Apocalypse will come if global warming is not stopped

William P. Hall on March 28, 2022

Our climate is heading towards Apocalypse. Four factors will probably end humanity if runaway global warming is not stopped by climate action

Thanks to 100 years of extracting burning fossil fuels, the human population has expanded to exploit and control the resources of essentially the entire surface of our planet.

We live on the surface of a sphere of finite size with a fixed surface area, but population growth is almost always exponential (i.e., growth is by multiplication from one generation to the next, rather than addition) — until all the resources are used up. This situation is called ecological overshoot when resources are consumed faster than our world can replace them.

As long as people try to carry on with business as usual the situation gets worse and worse until populations begin to collapse from system breakdown, starvation and disorder in what can become an Apocalypse when the four horsemen come out to play. These situations have occurred locally throughout human history (e.g., in the 14th Century when the Black Death overcame Europe), but now we face a situation that is even more dire.

Not only have we over stretched our limited resources, but the greenhouse gas emissions from our 100-year long frenzy to burn millions of years accumulation of fossil organic carbon has so changed the composition of our planet’s atmosphere that so more solar energy is captured to significantly raise the average temperature of the whole world. In turn, this extra heat has caused changes in the polar regions to capture still more heat — we are now crossing tipping points that lead towards runaway global warming and mass extinction. See my series of posts about David Spratt’s articles on this topic in Climate Code Red for an array of evidence that these tipping points are real.

David Shearman’s article in the political news blog, “The Hill”, featured here, shows a remarkably clear understanding of the ecological aspects of the current apocalyptic crisis I have outlined above. We need to stop the Apocalypse NOW by stopping runaway global warming.

Getty Images (from the article)

by David Shearman, 21/03/2022 in The Hill

The four horsemen of the apocalypse are destroying planet Earth

Climate change and loss of biodiversity are the terrible twins working together to threaten human existence. Unfortunately, their wicked problems are accompanied by two equally important drivers of calamity —population and economic growth. These four horsemen gallop in unison and must be considered together.

Read the complete article….

Stop the Apocalypse? In theory I would say, “Yes we can!”

If it took a much smaller (there were only 3 billion when I was born), and more ignorant population of humans more than 100 years of the industrial revolution using relatively primitive technology to stuff up our atmosphere. If it isn’t already too late….. Given our present population of 8 billion; vastly greater understanding of physics, geology, biology and many other kinds of science; combined with our vastly advanced and powerful technologies we should be able to work out how to recapture our excess emissions and safely put them back into the ground so the Earth can begin to cool.

However, as Shearman’s article shows, society will have to assemble, organize and mobilize a monumentally large and coordinated “global war effort” to have any hope of doing what is needed to avoid total mass extinction and ensure our species’ survival into the future.

In Australia our present LNP COALition Government has made it clear that they will do everything they can to keep shoveling Australian coal on the fire to support and further extend economic growth and business as usual until the very end. Our first step in organizing the war effort to escape the horsemen of the apocalypse must be to replace these puppets of the fossil fuel special interests headed up by Scotty from Marketing.

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 the Apocalypse

Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal
15/02/17 via the Guardian
We’ll keep mining!
09/09/2021 via the Guardian
We need to get the gas from under our feet. We’ve got to get the gas!
The future of power: What’s behind Australia’s push for gas-fired energy | ABC Four Corners

We need to turn away from the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse on 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.

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, 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.

Featured image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887. / Public domain: The author died in 1926, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 95 years or fewer.

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

Is it time for the hose, mate? Or is it too late already?

William P. Hall on March 22, 2022

Two news items to ponder when next voting: Earth’s poles are shockingly hot, and the IPCC thinks we can do something about it

FILE – A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

by SETH BORENSTEIN, March 19, 2022 in AP News

Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal: Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent … has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe,…

Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979….

What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said. And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.

Read the complete article….

These sorts of temperatures in what are supposedly the coldest places on our planet is a strong indication that our house is on fire, and that we need to get very serious about working to put it out before we are all consumed by it!

Current carbon-cutting commitments still put us on a catastrophic path toward 2.7C of warming by 2100.

by Amélie Bottollier-Depois, 18/03/2022 in Phys Org/Earth/Environment

UN report to lay out options to halt climate crisis: Nearly 200 nations gather on Monday to confront a question that will outlive Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: how do we stop carbon pollution overheating the planet and threatening life as we know it?

The answer is set to arrive on April 4 after closed-door, virtual negotiations approve the summary of a phonebook-sized report detailing options for drawing down greenhouse gases and extracting them out of thin air.

“The science is crystal clear, the impacts are costly and mounting, but we still have some time to close the window and get ahead of the worst of them if we act now,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think tank E3G.

“This report will supply the answers as to what we need if we’re serious about getting there.”

Read the complete article….

Are we too late to put out the fire? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t think so…. at least not quite yet. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report: Climate Change 2021/2022 consists of three parts: Part I, published last year – The Physical Science Basis , details the scientific background; Part II, published this month – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, details the troubles we face if warming is not stopped; and Part III to be published early April details how we can respond. Bad news, but not yet a death sentence.

How sure are we that we face imminent threats from continued warming?

Aside from warnings issued by the IPCC and individual climate scientists, we only need to pay attention to the world around us and the NB4 weather catastrophes assaulting our communities to see that the climate is deteriorating before our eyes at an accelerating rate. Some observations will illustrate what I mean here.

Illustration produced with the aid of the publicly available Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph provided by NASA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

This graph shows with remarkable clarity how much less ice cover there was on the Antarctic Ocean at the time of maximum melting, and how long that amount of ocean was ice-free and thus able to absorb solar heat that otherwise would have been reflected away from our planet. This heat will stay around slowing the rate of the winter freeze up and reduce the thickness of the ice cover so it melts away even faster in the following year than would otherwise be the case. Some of the heat will also speed melting of Antarctic glaciers from underneath. In other words, reducing the exent of the freezing provides positive feedback helping to drive global temperatures higher.

This graph shows air-temperature variation over essentially the whole of the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole from January through 20 March 2022. The scale is given in degrees Kelvin above Absolute Zero. Zero degrees Celsius is indicated by the blue line near the top of the graph. The green line shows the average mean temperature for each day of the year for the baseline reference years from 1958 to 2002. The red line shows this year’s mean temperatures for each day up to 20/03/2022. Every day this year the temperature has been at least 2 °C warmer than the reference temperature for the day. Recently, the whole area over the Arctic Ocean was 15 °C hotter than the reference temperature. At this temperature the Ice won’t be melting from the top, but it may be warm enough that warmish ocean waters under the ice may be doing some melting from he bottom. It also means that when spring comes the ice won’t be so cold, and will warm up to melting temperature earlier in the year.

And then there is yet more evidence from the last few days:

See also Matthew Cappucci, 16/03/2022 in the Washington Post, “Record ‘bomb cyclone’ bringing exceptional warmth to North Pole“

And then there are the climate catastrophes in Australia that some of you will have experienced personally and lived through… and the rest of us will have seen on the TV news.

What does this news tell us we should do about a man who “won’t hold a hose” and has committed ‘his’ government to keep shoveling coal on the fire?

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.

Our home world’s climate system is telling us via the rising frequency of NB4 extreme climate events that she’s burning up and will become increasingly uninhabitable as her global temperature keeps rising at an accelerating rate. If the fires aren’t hosed down enough for the world to cool, our population will begin collapsing as rising temperatures and increasingly extreme and overlapping disasters lead to heat deaths, famines and disorder as ecosystems begin collapsing around us. The result will leave its record in geology as a global mass extinction event.

Even a 16 year-old school girl could see what we need to do:

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, 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. Given that we are facing an existential crisis – this is the only issue that matters until the crisis is solved. Even the IPCC’s hyper-conservative 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 as noted above in his master’s voice, he doesn’t hold a hose, and is determined ‘to keep Australians burning coal as long as we possibly can’ and when they can’t burn that any more, burn more natural gas. And, as I have noted in previous posts, it seems that they actively work to prevent others from acting against the climate emergency because this might harm the profits of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry.

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.

Clearly, we need to replace the hoseless firebugs of the COALition with sensible people who are publicly committed to acting on the climate emergency or who can be counted on to vote this way because of party discipline.

Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System will help you use your preferential votes wisely on behalf of our offsprings’ future.

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

Capt Humbug tools up fossil fuel to fight (for) global warming

William P. Hall on March 20, 2022

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.

Read the complete article….

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

The puppets show and tell
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.”
Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal
15/02/17 via the Guardian
We’ll keep mining!
09/09/2021 via the Guardian
We need to get the gas from under our feet. We’ve got to get the gas!
The future of power: What’s behind Australia’s push for gas-fired energy | ABC Four Corners

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.

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, 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.

Not really climate, but good reasons he shouldn’t lead

Climate News Links on March 18, 2022

Scott Morrison shows his hypocrisy and inconsistency in everything except his rusted on support of the fossil fuel industry. It is time for him and his wooden-headed puppets to go

‘Why does Scott Morrison affect more costume changes than a Ru Paul’s Drag Race cabaret act in an exploding dress factory?’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

by Van Badham, 17/03/2022 in The Guardian/Opinion

As his ‘fauxgan’ act wears thin, desperation is driving Scott Morrison deeper into the dress-up box: Serious times require serious leaders. You may not like Anthony Albanese but he’s telling you who he is

Featured Image: Cover picture from The Shot’s The long, long, long list of all the times that Scott Morrison has said ‘it’s not my job’, by Nadine von Cohen on 21/04/2021. The full article is a must read along with van Badham’s article here. It is so clear that Morrison should not have the job of leading an effective response to the climate emergency we must ensure that he doesn’t have the chance to say that isn’t his job either. Use Vote Climate One’s resources to elect people who have publicly affirmed that this is in fact the job they will undertake if elected to Parliament.

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

Zero carbon by 2030

Lyn Hovey on March 17, 2022

Imagine waking up and not being ashamed of your country!

We live with ever increasing anxiety about species extinction (possibly including our own), environmental degradation, catastrophic bushfires and floods, deaths from heat stroke and a government that fails to act on the emergency. To survive, we will probably have to actively remove and safely sequester a significant fraction of the existing greenhouse gas from the global atmosphere, and possibly also enhance Earth’s reflectivity enough to reduce the amount of heat it captures from solar radiation. These goals will be hard to achieve, but let’s begin with the comparatively easy task of completely stopping human generated greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., zero carbon emissions from human activities.

Zero carbon by 2030 is a reasonable aspiration, especially in Australia.  We have the knowledge and the resources for a technological transition.  All we need is the political will. If we can do this, then we’ll know whether we have to do the other things also, and by then we should have a government able and willing to take leadership on these jobs as well.

Big necessary decisions must be made to advance Australia’s part in the Paris Agreement, including withdrawing public money and government support from fracking the Beetaloo Basin; closing down the giant new offshore gas field of the Scarborough-Pluto LNG project in W.A. and stopping the Adani coal mine and others in the Galilee Basin in Qld.  Serious social disruption will occur without a blueprint for future industries and jobs. 

The declaration of a Climate Emergency and the contingencies that flow from this will guide an economic transformation.  Just as radical change happened with the declaration of the war economy, shifting perspectives made the impossible seem possible. We cannot imagine how fast change can happen as we are used to the spin, obfuscation, rorting, incompetence, reliance on the market to find solutions and the privatisation of government decisions via outsourcing to big donors in contemporary government.

Setting aside the debate about the necessity of the limits to growth and a whole systems approach we need to elect a new Federal Government who can work with a cross bench to shift public opinion as fast as is politically possible.

Many industries and communities are writing blueprints for the future.  One comprehensive plan that will inspire hope and creative action in people who seek election at the 2022 Federal Election is The Million Jobs Plan by Beyond Zero Emissions.

by Beyond Zero Emissions, June 2020

The Million Jobs Plan: A unique opportunity to demonstrate the growth and employment potential of investing in a low-carbon economy

Read the entire document….

The publisher, Beyond Zero Emissions is an internationally recognised energy think-tank, that shows through independent research and innovative solutions how Australia can thrive through a transition to a zero-emissions economy. The plan aims to create employment, modernise our infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It proposes nation-building, transformative projects that can upgrade the economy, modernise industry, reskill the workforce and deliver a different future – economically and socially. The Plan includes case studies for coal industry regions.  The Plan aims to make Australia more prosperous, fairer and more resilient, with local jobs that are lasting, secure, well-paid and backed by safe and fair working conditions. Their research shows that this is entirely achievable.

Some of its key points include –

  • 70% of new jobs to be created in regional areas
  • Australia wide transmission line upgrades with government and private investment
  • renewable energy industrial zones and zero carbon community initiatives
  • Australian made manufacturing creating new supply chains
  •  Building mass scale renewables to electrify industry and drive the development of zero emissions metals, green hydrogen, steel and aluminium
  • electrify public transport including regional trains and buses
  • energy efficient social housing and the creation of new standards to drive net-zero energy housing
  • technology to boost local building material production through government procurement policy to prioritise local, lower embedded emissions
  • the creation of a renewable hydrogen sector to meet emissions free ammonia for use in the production of fertilizers
  • investing in the circular economy with resource recovery and waste recycling, from raw material extraction to end-of-life
  • revegetation of 27M hectares in 5 years, replanting to achieve carbon neutrality
  • regenerative agriculture as well as wetlands regeneration and biodiversity protection
  • investing in training and upskilling the workforce
  • a green stimulus package to foster research and development and jobs in education

We applaud the many people who have put their hands up to stand for election in 2022 to collectively advance Australia’s contribution to solving the existential crisis we currently face.

For information on how to make your vote count to elect House and Senate representatives in your electorate who will put action on climate change at the top of their to do list, our Traffic Light Voting System will give you information about the various candidates and show you how to make the most of your vote.

 Finally, a comprehensive analysis of the science of the state of the planetary emergency is essential reading.

Featured Image: Climate Sentinel Editor, based on an image by Kirsten Gillibrand from her campaign as a Democratic candidate in the primaries for the US Presidential Election in 2020. Source: via Wikimedia Commons.

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

French election campaign demos a major issue for Oz

Climate News Links on March 17, 2022

France’s presidential election campaign highlights the dangerous absurdity of candidates’ reluctance to “look up” to see the global climate emergency

Protesters urge governments to act against climate change and social injustice at a rally in Paris on March 12, 2022. © Benoît Tessier, Reuters

by Romain BRUNET Follow | Benjamin DODMAN Follow, 16/03/2022 in France 24

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.

US shows how lethal a fossil fuel puppet can be

Climate News Links on March 16, 2022

Although Joe Manchin claims to be a Democrat, because he holds a balance of power this wholly owned puppet can and does block most climate action

by Bill McKibben from The Crucial Years, 14/03/2022

The Senator from Fossil Fuel is ‘Beating Biden Badly’: Joe Manchin and the Case of the Closing Climate Window.

Featured Image: MRI scan showing Joe Manchin’s decision-making process. by John Deering | September 24, 2021 in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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

Is Scotty using climate disasters to distract us from fighting the root cause?

Climate News Links on March 16, 2022

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.

Featured Image: “It’s ok. I saved the valuables”.The Cathy Wilcox@cathywilcox1 on Twitter, via Know Your Meme

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

It is up to us to decide who governs us — climate warriors or humbuggers

William P. Hall on March 15, 2022

“This is coal” 09/02/2017 via David Marler on Youtube
“We’ll keep on mining coal” 09/09/2021 via The Guardian

We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters – reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species risks extinction no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship — and the risk continues to rise the longer we delay action.

William P. Hall

The climate emergency has two possible outcomes

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Risk runaway warming to a hothouse earth and extinction

RECOGNISE THE EMERGENCY

Mobilise to the max & work to become good stewards of our precious blue planet

There is no planet B

VOTE CLIMATE ONE to heal our planet

It is time for Australian citizens to reclaim our government from the puppets of the fossil fuel industry.

These humbugging puppets have been working for several years to keep their immensely rich patrons safe from any economic harm from actions to stop and reverse the global warming that has been changing our climate to allow ever more, and more deadly extreme weather events.

It is time for Australian citizens to replace the puppets in our Parliament with independent people or parties who are publicly committed to put action to fight the growing climate emergency at the top of their agendas if elected. As our name states, Vote Climate One has been established to help you elect these kinds of people in your individual electorates.

Welcome to our updated and “election ready” site!
Please check it out!

Home

Home explains what we are about and who we are.

Traffic Light Voting

Traffic Light Voting, explains how our system will help ensure that your vote will count maximally towards electing ‘climate friendly’ representatives in your house and senate electorates.

Climate Heroes

Climate Heroes explains how you can help in a very big way to put our voting guide in everyone’s hands in your electorate and help us to make the guide as accurate as it possibly can be.

Political Parties

Political parties discusses the roles political parties have played in Australia to bring us to the present state of general inaction relative to the worsening climate emergency, and what we know about their stances relative to solving the emergency.

Electorates

Electorates tells you what what we know about each candidate in each individual federal house and senate electorate, and shows you how we have ranked them in relation to their party or public stances on prioritizing action on the climate emergency.

Once the election is declared and the ballot papers laid out by the Electoral Commission, we will provide printable copies of the form so you can mark your preferences before you go to the polling booth to save you time when you are actually voting.

Climate Sentinel News

Climate Sentinel News is where we most differ from all other election-related web-sites. Here is where we present a curated collection of daily news items and scientific reports providing the concrete evidence relating to global warming and climate change that underlies our concerns for the futures of our families.

If you are unsure about the real importance of climate change and actions to control it, this information will keep you up to date with the latest scientific knowledge and continuing evidence from the daily news. This keeps telling us (1) we face real problems from climate change, and (2) that with the proper government, we may actually be able to make the world safer from it.

If you agree with us that we need a very different kind of government that can go beyond ‘business as usual’ there are some very positive things you can do to help spread the message

Basically our problem is that we are a purely volunteer outfit. Any funding we can raise goes to our Climate Heroes program to support posting and letter-boxing our paper Voting Guide in marginal electorates. However, the Web campaign is also critically important to reach possible swing voters in all electorates in hope that we may swing a few surprises here as well to remove some of the worst special interest puppets from their normally very safe seats.

The internet (Web) is truly remarkable in that social media has the power to circulate ‘interesting’ news to an exponentially growing market as fake news publishers all too frequently demonstrate. This doesn’t even have to be paid for if readers want to share the item.

We think VoteClimateOne’s Climate Sentinel News and/or our Traffic Light Voting System might be circulated in this same way. For example, if you find this post to be interesting enough to share with some of your friends, Google and other search engines will pick up on this interest and prioritize showing the post in other people’s search results over other, apparently less interesting stuff. There are some very simple things you can do in Facebook and Twitter to multiply this effect many times over.

For Facebook – when you receive a post from VoteClimateOne (like this one), (1) click the Like icon. (2) click the Share icon and then the Share now (Friends), write something in the comment saying why they should read the post and add some appropriate hash tags, e.g., #VoteClimateOne #AusPol #TellTheTruth #ScottyFromMarketing #WhereTheBloodyHellAreYou #AustraliaBurns #AustraliaFloods #ClimateEmergency #GlobalWarming. The presence of any one of these in YOUR comment to the item you are sharing will insure that this vote climate one post will be added to the posts indexed under that hash tag. And the more times this one post is shared by someone else also using the same hash tag, the closer this post will be to the top of the list someone sees when they do a search on the hash tag.

If everyone receiving a post from Vote Climate One shares only one post a day with all of their friends, within only a few days we will saturate the Web – especially if the hash tags are specifically Australian in context. Twitter works in very much the same way, but Paul Hosking, our Search Engine Optimization guru explains how this works in a video.

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

NB4 East Coast lows kill 21+ citizens — worse to come

William P. Hall on March 10, 2022

As long as global warming continues ever more extreme weather can be expected. Is our govt. doing enough to help mitigation & adaptation?

Jason O’Brien/AAP via The Conversation

by Barbara Norman, 09/03/2022 in The Conversation

The floods have killed at least 21 Australians. Adapting to a harsher climate is now a life-or-death matter:

The devastating floods in Queensland and New South Wales highlight, yet again, Australia’s failure to plan for natural disasters. As we’re seeing now in heartbreaking detail, everyday Australians bear the enormous cost of this inaction. It’s too soon to say whether the current floods are directly linked to climate change. But we know such disasters are becoming more frequent and severe as the climate heats up. In 2019, Australia ranked last out of 54 nations on its strategy to cope with climate change.

Read the complete article…

Featured Image: The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021) projects that ten year extreme weather events will become more common compared to the pre-industrial era. Based on data from Fig. SPM.6 of: Climate Change 2021 / The Physical Science Basis / Working Group I contribution to the WGI Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change / Summary for Policymakers. IPCC.ch SPM-23. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (9 August 2021). Source states: ● Hot temperature extremes over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of extreme temperature event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Heavy precipitation over land – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of heavy 1-day precipitation event that occurred once in 10 years on average in a climate without human influence; ● Agricultural & ecological droughts in drying regions – 10-year event – Frequency and increase in intensity of an agricultural and ecological drought event that occurred once in 10 years on average across drying regions in a climate without human influence. / Date: 29/20/2019 / Author: Femkemilene / Licensing: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

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