Climate change talk has been around for 30 years. Where's the action? / ABC Radio National Excerpt

 "Since 2015, the world has seen its five hottest years on record. Much of the eastern part of the country has been gripped by drought.

A few summers ago, fires burnt parts of alpine Tasmania that hadn't burnt in a thousand years. Last year was the hottest year in Australia since records began — and we had the biggest bushfires in history."

Scientists have repeatedly warned that the effects of climate change would include more extreme weather.(Supplied: Gena Dray)

Scientists have warned us about the dangers of 2 degrees of warming — at the moment, we're heading for more than that.(ABC News: Jordan Hayne)

'Scientists have spelt out this out repeatedly for 30 years, and environmental groups have championed the cause. But both made mistakes.

 For too long, scientists believed that the facts spoke for themselves, that all they had to do was get them out there. And the NGOs had a tendency come across as self-righteous, or guilt-trippy.

I was already on board — with me they were preaching to the choir — but I don't think they pulled in enough other people.

Climate Action Now

But here we are. After years of drought at home, and increasingly extreme weather all over the world, polling shows that most of us get it enough to think climate change is a problem and that we should do something about it.

And yet we've done very little. I want to know why. That's why I've made this series.

And yes, part of it turns out to be the fossil fuel industry. Part of it turns out to be that change is hard, and that it's been easier for politicians to do little, especially when they are themselves divided.

But part of it turns out to be you and me — our own psychology, the stuff that makes us human, means acting on climate change is hard to do.

Not that it can't be done — and there is hope. We'll get to that too. I hope you'll join me for Hot Mess."'

 By Richard Aedy for Hot Mess 

Richard Aedy has been a journalist for more than 30 years. He's been concerned about climate change for most of that time. He's been at Radio National since 1998. 

Read the complete ABC article 

Related: Climate change is deadlier than the Coronavirus: CAA

#drought, #wildfire, droughts, bushfire, science, climate science, Australia, #Australia, fossil fuel subsidies,  #climatejustice

We are talking about 'drought-proofing' again – they are simplistic solutions that will destroy Australia : The Guardian

"The Australian landscape, its plants and animals have evolved to cope with episodic flooding. 

By removing the water and preventing floods, we are also destroying that landscape and rivers functions that give life to it. The key lies in striking a better balance between the needs of the natural environment, agriculture and our cities. It also lies in being a lot smarter in how we use our water. For example, almost all of our urban storm water and most of our sewage effluent is not recycled.

The second myth – of making the desert bloom by turning coastal rivers to run inland – is as much in vogue today as it was 100 years ago. The drought has prompted calls to revive the Bradfield scheme, a 1930-40s plan to turn the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers back across the Great Divide into central Queensland and connect to the Murray-Darling. Two centuries of development in Australia seem to have taught us little about the hazards of salinity, soil and water degradation, loss of habitat and species and the simple fact that the communities from which the water is taken will one day want it back. An awful political dilemma.

The third myth of “drought-proofing” our drier areas is equally fraught with risk because it invites us to grow things in areas where the nature of Australia makes it inadvisable to do so. It involves bringing water to places where it is normally only an episodic event, and can cause unforeseen problems. From a national perspective it is also unnecessary. Australia has a huge “fertile crescent” of reliable high rainfall country and fertile soils around our coastline, on which we could develop sustainable agriculture and horticulture."

"The critical need is not to drought­-proof the inland, for that is impossible.

It is to myth-proof Australians."

Read the complete The Guardian article by Honorary Professor John Williams 

#jailclimatecriminals  #climatechange  #jail climate criminals #suethefossilfools

Related:

"This fictional short story is set in 2068

Time to rethink Australia's fire fighting resources.

📷: Bindi Cox

Our wildfires are taking lives, destroying homes and infrastructure and stressing our rural communities. 

Our firefighters in Australia, both paid and volunteer, are out there risking injury and putting their lives on the line, or at the very least sacrificing their work. Employers, often small business employers, are supporting them. Are our firefighters sufficient in number?

"There are still 50 fires burning across New South Wales, with 21 fires uncontained. A total of 630 firefighters have been deployed across the state. A fire in Bees Nest, north-west of Dorrigo in the Armidale area, is currently over 66,500 hectares and out of control." September 10

https://www.theguardian.com › australia-news › live › sep › queensland-nsw...

What are we losing in these fires?

📷 Photo Credit: Darren, Jimboomba Police

 • Of course we are losing homes and infrastructure. Communities are being traumatised. We are now wondering whether drought stricken communities will have the required water to fight the inevitable fires that climate change is increasing. 

• We now have a new fire category, 'extreme'.

• We are also losing precious forests and biodiversity. This week the Gondwana World Heritage Area has been severely damaged.

"The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, World Heritage Area, contains the most extensive areas of subtropical rainforest in the world, large areas of warm temperate rainforest, and the majority of the world's Antarctic beech cool temperature rainforest. These extraordinary areas still contain ancient and primitive plants and animals from which life on Earth evolved." NSW National Parks

The same fire began in the Guy Fawkes River National Park and by September10,  had burned 66,500 hectares and was 'out of control'.
 
"The park is a significant conservation site with amazing biodiversity. There are 24 threatened animal species you might encounter here, including the brush-tailed rock-wallabies that can often be seen in the park’s rocky areas." National Parks

There has been a world wide reaction to careless burning of the Amazon forests. Other countries are busily planting trees to protect soils and store carbon, yet Australia is busy clearing trees and fighting forest fires with limited resources. 




It is time to review our fire fighting resources.

We know some extra resources have been ordered or already purchased.

"New South Wales has signed a contract with United States-based Coulson Aviation to purchase three aircraft for firebombing duties, including a modified Boeing 737 large air tanker.

  

NSW buys Boeing 737 large air tanker for firefighting ...

https://australianaviation.com.au › 2019/05 › nsw-buys-boeing-737-large-..."

As we face an increasing number of fierce fires in an extended fire season, it is time to ask:

Are we allowing our rural communities to suffer unnecessarily?

Why are we allowing our world heritage forests with unique biodiversity to burn?

Do we have sufficient resources to fight fires and to extinguish them quickly?

Why are we still reliant on volunteers? Why are we putting volunteers at risk?

Do we have enough air support?

Is a budget surplus a priority over expanding our firefighting resources and better protecting our communities? 

Related:

What if we stopped pretending Climate Change could be prevented.

'People are dying': how the climate crisis has sparked an exodus to the US : The Guardian

"As part of the Running Dry series, the Guardian looks at how drought and famine are forcing Guatemalan families to choose between starvation and migration
by Nina Lakhani in Camotán

At sunrise, the misty fields around the village of Guior are already dotted with men, women and children sowing maize after an overnight rainstorm.

After several years of drought, the downpour brought some hope of relief to the subsistence farmers in this part of eastern Guatemala.

But as Esteban Gutiérrez, 30, takes a break from his work, he explains why he is still willing to incur crippling debts – and risk his life – to migrate to the United States.

“My children have gone to bed hungry for the past three years. Our crops failed and the coffee farms have cut wages to $4 a day,” he says, playing nervously with the white maize kernels in a plastic trough strapped to his waist."

Read The Guardian article

Related:  

Heatwave: think it’s hot in Europe? The human body is already close to thermal limits elsewhere :The Conversation

How climate change will affect your mortgage: SMH

Economic impact of climate change

In ordinary times, a person standing up to make a statement of the bleeding obvious isn’t news.

But the times, my friends, are anything but ordinary.

And in these times, when a person stands up and says climate change will have an inevitable impact on our economy, that is news.

Read the full SMH story

See also Port Macquarie map after a 7m sea rise 

'Change now or pay later': RBA's stark warning on climate change: SMH

"The Reserve Bank has warned climate change is likely to cause economic shocks and threaten Australia's financial stability unless businesses take immediate stock of the risks."

"Dr Debelle said the bank was speaking about the issue because of the size of the impact climate change would have on the economy.

"Some of these developments are actually happening now," he said.

Dr Debelle said the current drought across large swathes of the eastern states has already reduced farm output by around 6 per cent and total economic growth by about 0.15 per cent.

The worst-case scenario

Vote for my future climate

"Stephen Schneider explores what a world with 1,000 parts per million of CO 2 in its atmosphere might look like."

.... "Fairness must also be taken into account, given that some people would be at much greater risk than others: poor people in hot countries with little adaptive capacity, for instance, indigenous peoples and those exposed to hurricanes or wildfires, or living in low-lying areas. The elderly and children with asthma or other lung ailments would be particularly affected by urban air pollution or wildfire smoke plumes exacerbated by the extreme warming.

The economic outlook is no better. With warming of just 1–3 °C, projections show a mixture of benefit and loss. More than a few degrees of warming, however, and aggregate monetary impacts become negative virtually everywhere; and in a 1,000 p.p.m. scenario current literature suggests the outcomes would be almost universally negative and could amount to a substantial loss of gross domestic product. Millions of people at risk from flooding and

water supply problems would provide further economic challenges." ...

Read Stephen Schneider's essay

See also:

Climate Hackers - 'last ditch solutions to slow global warming': ABC 

.

Global warming is increasing the chances of worldwide harvest failure on the scale of the tragic 19th century drought and famine that claimed 50 million lives.

Awaiting aid in drought-ravaged Somalia in 2011. Image: Stuart Price/UN Multimedia

"LONDON − Climate change driven by human-induced global warming could recreate the conditions for a re-run of one of the most tragic episodes in human history, the Great Drought and Global Famine of 1875 to 1878.

Those years were marked by widespread and prolonged droughts in Asia, Brazil and Africa, triggered by a coincidence of unusual conditions in the Pacific, Indian, and North Atlantic Oceans.

The famine – made more lethal by the political constraints linked to 19th-century colonial domination of three continents – is now thought to have claimed up to 50 million lives.

And the message contained in new research published in the Journal of Climate is stark: what happened before could happen again."

Read the Climate Change blog article

#foodshortages  #famine  #global heating  #climate action  #asia  #brazil  #africa  

See also  New Report Warns Geoengineering the Climate Is a '...

Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

Stock Exchange

"Losses could soar to $24tn and wreck the global economy in worst case scenario, first economic modelling estimate suggests"

"The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, used economic modelling to estimate the impact of unchecked climate change. 

It found that in that scenario, the assets were effectively overvalued today by $2.5tn, but that there was a 1% chance that the overvaluation could be as high as $24tn.
The losses would be caused by the direct destruction of assets by increasingly extreme weather events and also by a reduction in earnings for those affected by high temperatures, drought and other climate change impacts."

Read the Guardian article

#climate catastrophe  #stranded assets  #economy  #global economy  #climate action  #extreme weather events  # economic modelling  #financial assets 

RT America Video: Climate change causing California wildfires

'Evidence of human-caused climate change is strengthening, a new report from 13 federal agencies says. It could cost hundreds of billions of dollars from rising sea levels and infrastructure damage, among other impacts.'

NBC News Published on Nov 24, 2018

Siemens: What is climate change? Video

Now 2 degrees has been shown to be too high a limit. 1.5 degrees is what we must try for. 

"Climate Change is the bad news story that isn’t going away 

From heatwaves to hurricanes, from droughts to floods 

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, putting lives at risk Human activity is causing our climate to change 

The CO2 emissions from our cars, our industries and our power plants are heating up the planet 

To prevent further dangerous levels of climate change Countries around the world signed up to the Paris Agreement The Paris 

Agreement aims to keep global warming below 2 degrees To stop the planet getting warmer, we need to reduce the use of fossil fuels 

And increase the share of renewable energy, like from wind, solar and low carbon sources 

Climate action is everyone‘s responsibility: governments, businesses, communities, individuals 

The actions we can take to reduce our carbon footprint, like investing in green technologies can also reduce costs and create jobs The risks and costs of inaction are too high to ignore. 

So what are we waiting for? The time to act is now." Siemens Nov 3,  2017

Siemens

The Guardian: We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN

Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC

• Overwhelmed by climate change? Here’s what you can do

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
 
The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.

Read the full The Guardian article

Wildfires will be more severe and more frequent. Climate change is here.

"Wildfires - California, USA

More than 30,000 people fled for their lives Thursday as a late-season wildfire swept across this town in the Sierra foothills, incinerating numerous homes and businesses and prompting desperate rescues of residents trapped inside buildings and on clogged evacuation routes.

The blaze exploded to more than 20,000 acres, adding to a catastrophic two years of wildfires in California that have raised new questions about how the state will cope with a warmer and drier climate."

Nov 9 2018

From:

Earth Report 

See also:

ABC NEWS: Evacuations ordered as Northern California wildfire grows

 

Camp Fire Updates: Chico and Paradise wildfire evacuations, news

"Basically, we haven't had rain since last May or before that," said Read, the fire chief. Everything is a very receptive fuel bed. It's a rapid rate of spread."

The odd ways that weather can unfold in a warming world

"Hurricane Harvey slammed into Houston, Texas, on August 25, 2017. Normally, hurricanes keep moving. Their high winds and torrential rains tend to last for only a brief time. But Harvey just sat over the city. For days. And it dumped a lot of rain. Really, a lot. By the time the storm had moved on, on August 29, it had drowned Houston with a whopping 164 centimeters (64.6 inches) of water, according to one rain gauge. That’s a record rainfall from one storm in one place in the continental United States. In fact, Harvey dumped so much rain that the National Weather Service had to add new colors to their rainfall maps of the event."

.......................

"And heavier rains and stronger storms are not the only ways in which a warming world is making our weather weirder. Higher temperatures can trigger droughts. Heat waves become more likely, and droughts can make them even worse. There can be changes to both global and local weather patterns. And the effects won’t always be what’s expected. In one truly odd twist, the continuing loss of summertime sea ice in the Arctic Ocean — one big result of a warming world — could make Siberian winters colder. What could be wackier than that?"

Read Full article Science News for Students