Just one day after the Queen’s death, another deeply sobering study related to the dangers of exceeding 1.5C of global warming was published.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II continues to reverberate globally. The ensuing media frenzy, rabid and ravenous at times, has been quite something to behold. I cannot think of another event or issue that’s received even remotely a similar amount of attention in recent times.
I am not here to argue about the merit and contributions of the Queen and the royal family though, nor a long overdue transition to an Australian republic, or the far too often overlooked, disregarded and darker history and confronting issues, including maintenance of power structures and the ongoing damage and ravages of state-sanctioned colonialism. That is not my place nor area of expertise, and I genuinely want to extend my sincere condolences to all who are saddened and suffering, whatever their reason, and whatever cultural background, political and personal persuasion they may have.
Are we going to wallow in the wall-to-wall 24 hour media coverage surrounding the death of a monarch on the other side of our planet?
This death of an old lady will likely have no more direct impact on us in Australia and our families and children than that the coins in our pockets will eventually have the head of a king facing left instead of the head of a queen facing right, and that we will replace “queen” with “king” in a few mantras, slogans and patriotic songs.
Or,
Are we going pay attention to the reality surrounding us; accept that we, our families, and our species are facing existential dangers from the ever worsening climate emergency accidentally started by the Industrial Revolution’s profligate burning of fossil fuels; and do something about it?
If we fail to act strongly enough and soon enough to stop and reverse the process, we condemn all of our species and its heritage to potential future generations to almost certain death in Earth’s Hothouse Hell that it is currently warming towards.
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.
