'He's coming home': Tim Flannery returns to Australian Museum

Professor Flannery

"While concerned about Australia's lack of action on climate, Professor Flannery said "you have to remain optimistic". 

"You’ve got to look at this problem over decades. It’s a problem that’s developed over two centuries and it’s not going to be solved tomorrow," he said.;

But he said Australia must do more and said neither side of politics was offering enough of a solution.

"Is any political party doing enough, given the current situation, to avoid two degrees of warming? It’s very unlikely. We’ve got to do more. Our targets need to be increased."

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#Professor Flannery,  #global heating  #climate action   # Australia  #  politicians

“Hothouse Earth” Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics: the Intercept

"By shifting to a “wartime footing” to drive a rapid shift toward renewable energy and electrification, humanity can still avoid the apocalyptic future laid out in the much-discussed “hothouse earth” paper, a lead author of the paper told The Intercept. One of the biggest barriers to averting catastrophe, he said, has more to do with economics than science.

When journal papers about climate change make headlines, the news usually isn’t good. Last week was no exception, when the so-called hothouse earth paper, in which a team of interdisciplinary Earth systems scientists warned that the problem of climate change may be even worse than we thought, made its news cycle orbit. (The actual title of the paper, a commentary published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, is “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”)"

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Related: The good, the bad and the ugly of climate change in 2018: Green Magazine

#wartimefooting  #fossilfuels  #coal  #hothouseearth  #anthropocene #climateactionnow

Why Saving the Earth Needs To Become Our Primary Political Obsession: Medium

Greenhouse gases

"Will Steffen, one of the authors of the Hothouse Earth paper, puts it like this:

“Absolutely no new fossil fuel developments. None. That means no new coal mines, no new oil wells, no new gas fields, no new unconventional gas fracking. Nothing new. Second, you need to have a rapid phase-out plan for existing fossil fuels.”

He also goes on to make the point that we need to be on something like a “wartime footing” in order to re-align the trajectory of the planet.

I mean, imagine if climate change, and all the other existential threats we have created, were a giant asteroid hurtling to earth — what resources we’d muster to save the planet! But in disaster movie scenarios, no-one ever objects to being rescued on the grounds that it might negatively affect their profits.

And there’s the crunch.

We need to outlaw fossil fuels."

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