Michelle Grattan in the Guardian says, “Multiple doctors’ organisations, led by the Australian Medical Association, and a major farm lobby have called on the federal government to boost Australia’s climate change ambition, as pressure mounts on Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to finalise a deal ahead of the Glasgow conference.”
Michelle Grattan in the Guardian (Aus.) September 14, 2021
This pressure is still based on a dangerously ‘optimistic’ IPCC view of the ‘probable’ future. The IPCC view does not factor in the last two or three years of marked acceleration in NB4 extreme climate events or consider the likely consequences if the world is still warming past 2050 or 2100.
The recent crescendo of NB4 events, combined with a longer look into the future suggests that global warming is starting to ‘run away’ from our limited capacity to actually stop and reverse the warming. If we fail to do this, we are not just faced with some crop failures and an excessive number of heat-related deaths; but rather total collapse of our agricultural and social systems, and inevitable human extinction along with most other large and complex organisms sharing the planet with us.
We need immediate and sustained action to control and reverse global warming, and any politician not working to help achieve this should be immediately turfed out of office and replaced by someone who will work for us, rather than the fossil fuel special interests and their friends.
Our Vote Climate One guide provides a simple way for you to use our preferential voting system to vote for only those candidates who will support and work for immediate action on climate change. Our stoplight system doesn’t tell you who to vote for, but does flag those parties or individuals whose record suggests they are more likely to support the special interests and others trying to delay action than prioritize actions to deal with the existential climate emergency.
Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
