A major challenge in communicating complex messages about climate change is that the more simplified media reports of these events often have more influence than the science itself.
This worries observers who argue that giving countries the impression that emissions can continue to grow until 2025 would be a disaster for the world.
“We definitely don’t have the luxury of letting emissions grow for yet another three years,” said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.
“We have eight years to nearly halve global emissions. That’s an enormous task, but still doable, as the IPCC has just reminded us – but if people now start chasing emissions peak by 2025 as some kind of benchmark, we don’t have a chance.”
Editor’s note: Based on my rigorous evaluation of the IPCC’s scientific methodology and writing processes, even the corrected understanding of the IPCC report STILL UNDERSTATES the likelihood of the risk from, and the magnitude of consequences of failures or even delays in stopping the progress of global warming. In reality, the report says it is already too late to avoid global average temperatures rising more than 1.5 °C. By reaching net zero in 2030 AND extracting and sequestering most of the excess CO₂ already in the atmosphere we might be able to bring temperatures back down to 1.5 °C or less. Continuing with business as usual keeps us on the road to runaway warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and social collapse leading towards global mass extinction of humans and most other large and complex organisms on the planet.
Featured Image: A dried out reservoir in Chile where drought has forced the government to take emergency measures. / Getty Images / from the article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Part III of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment published late on 4 April says net zero alone won’t stop global warming. Carbon capture is also needed.
According to the Third Part of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report published this week, our last chances to stop and reverse the still accelerating global warming are running out of time. If we don’t act effectively within the next three years or so, humanity will be condemned to extreme hardship and dieoffs as increasingly large areas of our only planet become effectively uninhabitable because of high temperatures and extreme weather, and our agricultural systems also begin to fail for the same reasons. I have already commented extensively on Parts I and II of the report and consequently have reached and written about many of the topics covered in Part III, and my conclusions from the evidence are even more grim than the IPCC’s. So, other than providing a bit of background on the IPCC and possible limitations of their authoring process, in this post I simply present links to 12 independent commentaries.
Background
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (!PCC) was established by the United Nations in 1988 to study and make recommendations relating to climate changes triggered by the greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere beginning in the Industrial Revolution by the burning of coal and other fossil carbons for energy production. It presents the most solidly based and peer reviewed scientific understanding of the rapidly expanding climate crisis there is. However, because of its political and academic foundations it has and will consistently under-represent novel and extreme consequences of the on-going global warming. (The reasons for this scientific reticence or ‘conservatism‘ are discussed and explained in detail in my presentation: Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong.)
However, even in the face of these constraints, the AR6 part 3 Report: Climate Change 2022 – Mitigation of Climate Change, accepts and is based on the extensive research reported in parts 1 and 2 of the full report that failure to stop and reverse global warming before temperatures reach 2.0 °C (or preferably 1.5 °C) will be catastrophic for humans and the biosphere.
Where are we now with the physical state of our atmosphere that drives climate change
NOAA Trends in atmospheric greenhouse gases as at 8 April 2022 / Data source NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases. / William Hall
The rising concentrations of the three most important greenhouse gases shown above record the physical physical measurements in parts per million or parts per billion (compared to the total number of gas molecules of any kind in the atmosphere) as reported from the Mouna Loa (Hawaii) climate observatory. Details on how the samples were collected, processed and measured are available on the observatory web site. One thing worth noting, is that the longest base-line record from the observatory itself at 3400 meters elevation in the oceanic sub-tropics (shown here) that peaked in February is not identical to the worldwide average CO₂ from multiple sites shown for the Global Monthly Mean CO2 that is still rising in March. NH₄ and N₂O graphs show global means.
It is also worth nothing that the atmospheric concentrations for all of the gases reflect both human generated emissions AND the Earth’s ‘natural’ emissions for each year. We can control human emissions, but the natural emissions increase significantly with each rise in global average temperature.
The chart below shows RELATIVE changes in the global average temperature for each year relative to the global temperature averaged over the 30 years years 1951 through 1980. Earth’s temperature is based on a balance between the absorption of energy from solar radiation at ‘visible’ wave lengths by the planet and everything on it, and the emission of infrared energy by the planet and everything on it. Greenhouse gases heat the planet by blocking some outgoing infrared wave lengths causing the planet to warm until enough energy can be emitted at shorter (more energetic) wavelengths to balance the incoming visible radiation. Again this is a purely physical process that can be measured to relatively high precision.
Global average temperature datasets from NASA, NOAA, Berkeley Earth, and meteorological offices of the U.K. and Japan, show substantial agreement concerning the progress and extent of global warming: all pairwise correlations exceed 98%. / CC BY-SA 4.0 File:20200324 Global average temperature – NASA-GISS HadCrut NOAA Japan BerkeleyE.svg (Version 12) – for more details on sources and construction of the graph see: Wikimedia Commons.
The early trends illustrated by these facts are what drove the formation of the IPCC and its series of increasingly desperate calls to action in its series of “Assessment Reports” involving thousands of well qualified research scientists working as authors over the years of it existence. The 6th Assessment Report discussed here consists of 3 parts: I – The Physical Science Basis: 3949 pages, published 7 Aug 2021; II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: 3675 pages, published 27 Feb 2022, and III – Mitigation of Climate Change: 2913 pages, published 4 April 2022. Together the full 3 part report includes 10,537 pages of meticulously peer-reviewed content. My December 202 presentation, Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong details the IPCC’s rigorous processes for producing the reports. My major criticism is that these processes add years of delay between scientific observations and publication, that the political and academic/institutional environments lead to reticence and understatement of risks, and that an over-reliance on mathematization gives the impression that complexly and chaotically dynamical systems such as the generation of weather and climate are more accurate than they can actually be.
Whatever humbug our governments tell us, we won’t know if we can get off the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell state until all of the above curves are actually trending downward. As long as they point upwards, it is a clear indication that we are headed towards runaway warming and the unsurvivable hothouse.
Simply stated, where the IPCC observes that the future of humanity is dire, the reality is that it will probably be even worse than that.
What do others make of the IPCC’s Part III report?
Following are 12 independent takes on the IPCC’s recommendations for what we can do that might mitigate the global warming that is already dialed into Earth’s Climate System. Urgently stopping human carbon emissions on its own is no longer enough to stop warming soon enough to avoid major catastrophic damage. We will also have to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere with still unproven technolgies:
One success story in the battle against climate change is that renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines, have dropped significantly in cost over the past decade.Credit: Vincenzo Izzo/LightRocket via Getty
Radical emissions cuts combined with some atmospheric carbon removal are the only hope to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, scientists warn.
Humanity probably isn’t going to prevent Earth from at least temporarily warming 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels — but aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and extract carbon from the atmosphere could limit the increase and bring temperatures back down, according to the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report makes it clear, however, that the window is rapidly closing, and with it the opportunity to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. Above the 1.5 °C limit — set by the Paris climate agreement in 2015 — the chances of extreme weather and collapsing ecosystems grow.
If the world acts now, we can avoid the worst outcomes of climate change without any significant effect on standards of living. That’s a key message from the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The key phrase here is “acts now”. Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC working group behind the report, said it’s “now or never” to keep global warming to 1.5℃. Action means cutting emissions from fossil fuel use rapidly and hard. Global emissions must peak within three years to have any chance of keeping warming below 1.5℃.
Unfortunately, Australia is not behaving as if the largest issue facing us is urgent – in fact, we’re doubling down on fossil fuels.
In recent years, Australia overtook Qatar to become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We’re still the second-largest exporter of thermal coal, and the largest for metallurgical coal.
A new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlines what progress has been made in tackling global warming so far – and what will be needed for the world to curb emissions and achieve its climate targets.
It is the third part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6), a process that comes around every six or seven years and aims to provide a comprehensive view of the state of knowledge on climate change. (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A.)
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This report, by the IPCC’s Working Group III (WG3) “provides an updated global assessment of climate change mitigation progress and pledges, and examines the sources of global emissions”
Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, say climate scientists in what is in effect their final warning.
The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a “now or never” dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate.
Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
The final cost of doing so will be minimal, amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and individuals.
But the chances were narrow and the world was failing to make the changes needed, the body of the world’s leading climate scientists warned. Temperatures will soar to more than 3C, with catastrophic consequences, unless policies and actions are urgently strengthened.
The latest major climate assessment outlines the urgency and feasibility of rapid decarbonization to preserve the economy, health, and a stable climate.
In the just-released third installment of its Sixth Assessment Report (the first two volumes covered climate change causes and impacts), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizes the latest scientific research on efforts to mitigate climate change. Written by 278 authors from 65 countries, the new report can be summarized in one word: “urgency.”
To meet the Paris targets, the IPCC says that global emissions must peak immediately; that governments have not yet implemented sufficient policies to make that happen; and that continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure would create additional stranded assets potentially amounting to trillions of dollars in lost investments.
Smoke billows from a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, September 2019. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters / from the article
by Peter Kalmus, 07/04/2022 in The Guardian Opinion
On Wednesday, I was arrested for locking myself onto an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown LA. I can’t stand by – and nor should you.
“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.” – United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres
I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?
Analysis: The third part of the panel’s report makes clear a century of rising emissions must end before 2025.
Thirty months: that is the very short time the world now has for global greenhouse gas emissions to finally start to fall. If not, we will miss the chance to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
The conclusion of the world’s scientists, collated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and approved by all the world’s governments, says this reversal requires “immediate and deep” cuts in emissions everywhere.
The language of the third part of the IPCC’s report is less dramatic than the first two, which placed “unequivocal” blame on us for putting a “livable future” in grave peril. Rather than plainly stating the scale of the climate emergency, the new assessment spells out what needs to be done. Its text was therefore haggled over furiously by those states with much to lose.
The world has its best chance yet to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, but hard and fast cuts are needed across all sectors and nations to hold warming to safe levels, the global authority on climate change says.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today, says opportunities to affordably cut global emissions have risen sharply since the last assessment of this kind in 2014. But the need to act has also become far more urgent.
The report is the definitive assessment of how well the world is doing in finding solutions to rising temperatures. We each contributed expertise to the report.
Here, we explain key aspects of the findings and what it means for the world, including Australia.
The goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees is no longer likely to be achieved, the latest report of the United Nations chief climate body says, though scientists still believe warming may be stabilised and returned under the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious warming target after a period of “overshoot”.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published early on Tuesday morning Australian time, was evidence of a damning “litany of broken promises” and a “file of shame”, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a speech after the release of the report.
Mr Guterres, whose language on climate has become increasingly strong since the lead-up to the COP26 climate talks last year, catalogued the empty pledges that put humanity “firmly on track towards an unlivable world”.
He said governments and companies had lied to people about their commitments to reducing emissions, and that though the world needed to see a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by the end of the decade the world was on track for a 14 per cent increase.
Large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods is now “unavoidable” if the world is to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to this week’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The report, released on Monday, finds that in addition to rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse emissions, CO₂ removal is “an essential element of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5℃ or likely below 2℃ by 2100”.
CDR refers to a suite of activities that lower the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. This is done by removing CO₂ molecules and storing the carbon in plants, trees, soil, geological reservoirs, ocean reservoirs or products derived from CO₂.
As the IPCC notes, each mechanism is complex, and has advantages and pitfalls. Much work is needed to ensure CDR projects are rolled out responsibly.
Limiting global warming to 1.5C or 2C would mean “rapid and deep” emissions reductions in “all sectors” of the global economy, says the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Instead, emissions have continued to rise – albeit at a slowing rate – and it will be “impossible” to stay below 1.5C with “no or limited overshoot” without stronger climate action this decade, says the new document, which forms part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
It outlines how these emissions cuts could be achieved, including “substantial” reductions in fossil fuel use, energy efficiency, electrification, the rapid uptake of low-emission energy sources – particularly renewables – and the use of alternative energy carriers, such as hydrogen.
The new UN report shows the world is not on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, the more ambitious Paris Agreement target, and that the window to achieving the goal is closing fast.
One of its lead authors, Australian National University Professor Frank Jotzo, says it may no longer be plausible that the world can make the necessary immediate global reduction in emissions.
But the report also presents a range of solutions that, if applied immediately, could limit global warming, some of which have not been part of previous versions.
What do we know about the LNP’s concerns and abilities to mitigate the climate crisis?
As noted in my previous post, many communities are already well prepared to switch from fossil to renewable energy sources as soon as the supply and distribution issues can be resolved. Given that governments supposedly exist to protect and keep their citizens safe from external threats (i.e., global warming) in this case) we should be able to expect that that they would be promoting and facilitating the growth and spread of renewable energy technologies. But, at least in the case of Australian federal and some state governments, they are dong precisely the opposite: denying the science, and blocking and humbugging efforts to research, develop, promote, and roll out renewable technologies across all of our communities.
We have to replace the COALition Government in Parliament with people we can trust to put action on climate change as their first priority before we can have any hope that the government will do its job to facilitate and support effective action to stop global warming and mitigate its effects. Not only do we need to replace Capt Humbug and his troop of fossil fuel puppets, but the clean-out should also include micro-party members such as mining multi-billionaire Clive Palmer’s one-man fake news bureau Craig Kelly, and Pauline Hanson’s anti-science nut Malcolm Roberts.
If you doubt my interpretation, let the fossil fuel industry puppets and humbuggers tell you in their own words how hard they are working to keep growing their patrons’ greenhouse gas emitting industries in the face of the oncoming climate catastrophe.
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:
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 young one’s future.
Give the children a future worth running towards rather than misery and probable death in the collapsing shambles of global mass extinction along the road to Hothouse Hell
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Anthony Albanese – Opposition Leader (30/1/2022) Front-running Labor PM candidate Albanese was on the grill today without a word being said about the only issue that really matters for our future – the invisible emergency of our impending extinction
Sometimes I wonder if ABC News is a willing stooge of the fossil fuel industry special interests or if they just don’t care about the biggest but effectively invisible emergency the human species has faced in our recorded history.
Science and the fossil fuel industry (at least Big Oil) have had no doubts about the contribution of greenhouse gas emissions to global warming for at least 40 years. Science has come to understand that uncontrolled global warming represents an existential crisis to the planetary biosphere (including humans). By contrast, the fossil fuel industry (again led by Big Oil) have considered only that public understanding of the crisis represents a real threat to their profits. This must be combated by doing everything they can to deny and discredit the science, and block any actions that might be taken to force a reduction in the burning of their products. Two of many reviews of this history of denial, lies, and sabotage are provided by Inside Climate News and Wikipedia. The WIkipedia article provides a comprehensive list of further references documenting these assertions.
Especially over the last five years, the accelerating growth in the scale of NB4 extreme weather and wildfire events are undeniable signs that the climate emergency is growing ever worse because nothing is being done to mitigate its causes. Much of this failure is a direct consequence of the effectiveness of the fossil fuel special interests’ activities to deny, distract, denigrate, misdirect attention from the stark reality of our still rapidly growing risk of near-term extinction. They have made the emergency effectively invisible.
Today’s Insiders shows how effectively people and even the major news media have been distracted away from giving any attention to the need for managing the real emergency. The first 20 minutes of the program were devoted almost entirely to Covid, Covid, Covid. Without any doubt Covid is a worrisome issue. It is a nasty disease (but by no means the worst). Even if absolutely nothing had been done to stop, mitigate or treat it, it might have killed 5% of humans – which in a few years may seem to be a minor blip compared to diseases like bubonic plague, that killed up to 50% of Europeans in the Middle Ages. However, because we know how to deal with viruses, Australia’s cumulative death rate beginning with the first Covid death is currently just 1.22 deaths per 10,000 people.
The interview with Albanese lasted 18½ minutes with virtually every question/answer tied to Covid in one way or another, with the last 2-3 more focused on how Albanese would work with National Cabinet. Following the interview, the Insider’s Panel waffled around several non-critical issues. The real emergency remained invisible.
Only around 50min 50 seconds into the program was anything remotely related to climate mentioned (and this is despite the fact that summer rains have created a flood emergency so extreme in South Australia that all rail links with NT and across the Nulabor have been cut – probably for a week or more – and trucks are having to drive 3,000 km out of their normal routes to supply the NT. The RAAF has had to be called in to supply central towns like Coober Pedy with basic foods to say nothing of other economic disruptions). In any event, the last two minutes of the panel discussion were devoted to Morrison’s promise (for what that is worth) to spend a billion dollars over the next 9 years on ‘protecting’ the Great Barrier Reef. A couple of panelists did mention that some comments had been made that these promises offered nothing to combat the primary source of danger to the Reef — climate change. However, even these brief notices focused only on Morrison’s promises, and not the danger from the invisible emergency.
My main point here is not to attack Insiders or the ABC specifically, but to point out how incredibly effective fossil fuel’s denial, disinformation and distraction campaign has been to remove consideration and discussion of the only issue that matters where humankind’s future survival on our only planet is considered. The LNP COALition has been supremely effective in transmitting and multiplying fossil fuel’s speaking points to stifle any effective discussion or action on the climate emergency. The reality that the LNP COALition Government puts the desires of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry above and before any genuine concerns for the Australian people is clearly evident in any action or speaking that contacts the favored industries. The end result is that Australia has taken no significant actions to even begin mobilization to combat global warming. They are giving their already super-wealthy FF friends a few more years of profit, at the expense of rapidly reducing the already few years we have to stop and reverse the warming before we pass the point of no return on the road to extinction.
Insiders shows us that it is high time for us Australians to wake up from our humbug induced stupor, smell the smoke, and start putting out the fires that are burning up our house. Because they are effectively smothering us in a thick fog of lies, bulldust and blather that effectively hides all kinds of malfeasances, our first order of business in the election will have to be replacing wooden headed puppets of the fossil fuel and other special interests with respectable people who have committed to prioritize action on the climate emergency. We can help you do this with our Traffic Light Voting System.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Whether the media frenzy over the deportation of the world’s no. one tennis star and notorious anti-vaxer happened by good luck or was designed by the Australian COALition Government’s gang of fossil fuel puppets and clowns, it has and will serve for many days as a marvelous distraction to obscure the climate emergency from voters attention. The two-year long Government humbug and media blather about how we faced utterly horrible dangers from Covid has worked very well to divert attention from mobilizing any effective action against the genuinely existential climate emergency. Playing the Djoker Card only makes that more effective.
‘While the decision was almost a certainty, the government’s handling of the circumstances around it was not pretty.’ Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
After inexplicably failing to foresee the problem, Scott Morrison was left with only one solution: play the border security card.
Scott Morrison kept Novak Djokovic waiting nine days for the ultimate and inevitable decision to tear up his visa, no doubt ensuring the Serb suffered further for causing trouble the government struggled to handle.
The Djokovic visa snub was released in time for the main TV news bulletins on Friday and, they had hoped, late enough to limit the tennis champ’s lawyers chances of getting a judge to re-hear his case.
While that hope proved unfounded, the government believes a court could only examine the probity of immigration minister Alex Hawke’s use of his power to withdraw a visa, not whether Djokovic deserved to be punted.
However, the damage to Australian tourism and Australian sport caused by a single, stubborn tennis player and a hesitant federal government could require a formal inquiry to sort out.
The government might further explain how Djokovic obtained a visa in the first place, and Tennis Australia might tell sport fans why it welcomed a player – admittedly the best in the world – without insisting he comply with vaccination requirements, or without closely examining his claim for an exemption.
The long wait for Hawke’s announcement was an indication the government wanted to get the visa matter right, something it might have considered more rigorously several weeks ago when the Djokovic problem poked over the horizon.
Morrison has had to juggle complex factors involving big sport, inflamed diplomatic contacts, and his self-burnished record as being untiringly vigilant on Australian borders. [My emphasis]
Again, I ask the question, is this just the COALition’s cack-handed ineptitude or a Scotty crafted distraction to obscure the climate emergency to protect his fossil-fuel patrons?
As an evolutionary biologist, population and molecular biology (i.e., the basis of virology) are major components in my qualification. I am completely confident that at its worst, even with no quarantining and treatment, the Covid pandemic would have killed no more (and probably substantially less) than 5% of humanity, representing only a small blip in human history (comparable to the Spanish Flu 100 years ago). By contrast, global warming genuinely threatens mass extinction of most of Earth’s complex life, including humans. This is a truly existential emergency triggered by the greenhouse gas emissions from burning of hundreds of thousands to millions of years accumulation of fossil carbon that fueled the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago and continues today. Yet the continual emission of government blather and humbug over minor but titillating events and factoids as further amplified by fossil fuel friendly shock jocks consumes so much of the media’s available bandwidth that only the most extreme weather events ever come close to making headlines. There is almost total silence about how these events relate to the bigger picture.
For a hint of the bigger picture of the existentially real emergency we face see:
Take an objective look at the Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison led LNP COALition Governments’ years of denial, lies, fake news, misrepresentations and overall humbug in relation to global warming and the climate emergency it is causing…. Can there be any doubt that the principal interests they are serving are the special ones in the fossil fuel and related industries? The government puppets and clowns have never expressed major concerns relating to the horrific consequences Australian citizens have and are facing as a consequence of the accelerating increases in temperatures and climate extremes. If any concerns have been expressed, none have resulted in substantive actions to control and reduce the damages being caused by the industry’s carbon emissions and other activities. In fact, the puppets work hard impede and prevent action on climate change and to subsidize and protect the industry from citizen-led actions.
However, Australia still is a democratic country where it should be possible to vote the COALition out of power in the upcoming Federal Election. We should be able to replace every last puppet and fellow traveler of the special interests with people who if they are elected are committed to put mobilization and action to resolve the climate emergency as their first priority of business.
Vote Climate One doesn’t tell you how to vote, but our Traffic Light Voting Guide shows who not to vote for and provides practical assistance in ranking all the candidates in each electorate to ensure your preferences don’t flow to the puppets, but rather towards people committed to solving the climate emergency. Also, if you really want to help, we invite you to become a Climate Hero.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The climate emergency is an existential crisis for humans. Bill McKibben explains why the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency even though we risk extinction by ignoring it.
We face an existential crisis of our own making. It threatens to exterminate the human species and most other complex life on our only planet. Yet, day after day, after day, …. the Australian daily press will print multiple pages with nothing but news about the ‘Covid crisis’. And this doesn’t include long articles on the travails of a multi-millionaire anti-vaxer tennis star not being allowed to play his usually tantrum punctuated game at the Australian Open.
At it’s worst, even if nothing is done to minimize its effects, Covid would only kill 1 to 5% of the population. The 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic (see Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics) killed about this many people. Similarly, 100 years later the Covid Pandemic would be hardly noticed as a minor ripple in human history. Even the Black Death around 1350 that may have killed 50% of all humans at the time had no particularly detrimental consequences on the success of our species.
Today, the ultra-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts utterly dire consequences for humanity and our biosphere if we don’t solve the climate crisis. If we fail here, there will be no human history at all, not just a minor blip! Yet the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency Surely, this is the crisis that the press should be covering every day.
Journalism is constructed around finding something new. (I think that’s why they’re called newspapers). Which is a problem when it comes to the climate crisis. In geological terms, we are speeding toward the abyss—we’re pouring carbon into the atmosphere hundreds and thousands of times faster than during the volcanic outpourings that marked the previous great extinction events in earth’s history. But in journalistic terms, it happens just a little too slowly to quite register—climate change today is pretty much the same as climate change yesterday and tomorrow. Over a decade or two it will profoundly change the planet, but a decade is not a unit that really registers for TV, much less Twitter. The climate crisis is at all times the most important thing happening on earth, by far, but there’s rarely a twenty-four-hour period when, by the standards we’re used to, it’s the most important thing happening that particular day. It is inexorable, and inexorability is hard for journalists to capture.
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And so, even though there’s finally skilled and deep coverage of the issue in some corners of the press (I think over the last five years the Times and the Post have done a better job of covering global warming than any other subject, with one remarkable reporting job after another), its scale—the fact that it threatens everything we know and hold dear—hasn’t sunk in. It requires repetition, constant reiteration of the same small set of facts: the planet is heating rapidly, cheap solar and windpower can slow it down, these are being blocked by vested interest. But repetition and constant reiteration are precisely what reporters and editors don’t like doing, hence the constant search for a “new angle.” I follow, for instance, the Twitter feed of Terry Hughes, the Australian marine scientist who has done more than anyone to chart the ongoing realtime destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. If journalism worked better, that destruction—over the course of a very few years, of the largest living structure on the planet—would be a compelling story. But instead, to his constant and correct exasperation, absurd updates about, say, 3-D printers producing new corals help take the edge off the tragedy. They get attention simply because they’re new; the mass death of an enormous ecosystem is the same story as before.
McKibben nails the issues where the 4th Estate (journalism) is concerned, but says nothing (here) about how the press’s selective inattention helps serve the special interests of the patrons and puppet-masters of the 2nd Estate (our government) over the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, here in Australia (and in many other areas of the world) we are cursed by the fact that many of our governing politicians are more concerned to support the selfish short-term special interests of their multi-billionaire patrons rather than the life-time interests of the people who elect them. By default, the press’s easy distraction by trivia, humbug, fake news, misrepresentation, and misdirection so easily created by the special interests and their government lackeys works to hide the real crisis that threatens our survival.
Stopping human greenhouse gas emissions on its own, will probably not be enough. To initiate actual cooling we will probably also have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely sequester it somewhere that it will not simply return to the atmosphere, and increase Earth’s ability to reflect excess solar energy away from the planet.
One of the few ways I can think of to remedy this situation is to take charge of the electoral process to purge our Parliament of puppets working for special interests and replace them with people we have good reasons to think will understand the real dangers that face us, take the climate emergency seriously as a first priority, and begin the work to mobilize society to begin effective actions to reverse global warming. In every electorate, Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you direct your votes away from the puppets and towards people our research suggests will put climate action first where their parliamentary actions are concerned.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
