How climate change impacted the world 2019: CNN video

#ClimateEmergency  #wewantclimateactionnow   #jailclimatecriminals

False Solutions to Climate Change: Agriculture: Resilience

"A veritable cornucopia of false solutions is being pushed these days, not only by corporations and think tanks but by the UN’s IPCC, the international body responsible for research and action on climate.  We could have made a gentle transition if we had begun when we first became aware of this problem decades ago, but for various reasons we did not. There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!”

I’ve divided the issue into sectors: electricity generation, transportation, agriculture, buildings, and then there are two sections on false solutions that aren’t part of an energy sector—geoengineering schemes, and some other policy options. Finally, we look at real solutions. I am not an expert on anything except maybe gardening, so my hope is to spur discussion.

Part 3: The Agricultural Sector"

Read the excellent complete Resilience article

On land, Australia’s rising heat is ‘apocalyptic.’ In the ocean, it’s worse.: Washington Post

"The Washington Post’s examination of accelerated warming in the waters off Tasmania marks this year’s final installment of its global series “2C: Beyond the Limit,” which identified hot spots around the world. The investigation has shown that disastrous impacts from climate change aren’t a problem lurking in the distant future: They are here now. 

Nearly a tenth of the planet has already warmed 2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, and the abrupt rise in temperature related to human activity has transformed parts of the Earth in radical ways. 

In the United States, New Jersey is among the fastest-warming states, and its average winter has grown so warm that lakes no longer freeze as they once did. Canadian islands are crumbling into the sea because a blanket of sea ice no longer protects them from crashing waves. Fisheries from Japan to Angola to Uruguay are collapsing as their waters warm. Arctic tundra is melting away in Siberia and Alaska, exposing the remains of woolly mammoths buried for thousands of years and flooding the gravesites of indigenous people who have lived in an icy world for centuries. 

Australia is a poster child for climate change. Wildfires are currently raging on the outskirts of its most iconic city and drought is choking a significant portion of the country."

Read the Washington Post article

'Blown away': Safe climate niche closing fast, with billions at risk: SMH

By Peter Hannam

May 5, 2020

As much as one-third of the world's population will be exposed to Sahara Desert-like heat within half a century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the pace of recent years.

Scientists from China, the US and Europe found that the narrow

climate niche that has supported human society would shift more over the next 50 years than it had in the preceding 6000 years.

"As many as 3.5 billion people will be exposed to "near-unliveable" temperatures averaging 29 degrees through the year by 2070. Less than 1 per cent of the Earth's surface now endures such heat.

That heat compares with the narrow 11- to 15-degree range that has supported civilisation over the past six millennia, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Xu Chi, a researcher at China's Nanjing University and one of the paper's authors, said: "We were frankly blown away by our own initial results. As our findings were so striking, we took an extra year to carefully check all assumptions and computations."

Read the complete SMH article

Australian businesses call for climate crisis and virus economic recovery to be tackled together: The Guardian

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australia Industry Group, says Covid-19 and climate are ‘urgent’ challenges that overlap.


A leading Australian business group is calling for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says economic recovery from the virus and the transition required to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 are overlapping issues that should be taken on together.

“There’s a lot that we can do to rebuild stronger and cleaner,” Willox planned to say on Tuesday, according to a speech released in advance.

“The need is urgent. Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century.” 

Read the complete The Guardian article

NSW and Queensland coal industry uses as much water as all Sydney households, report finds: The Guardian

"The coal industry in New South Wales and Queensland is using as much water as all of Sydney’s households, according to new research.

A new report by University of Adelaide water resources academic Ian Overton, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, used public data to examine the impact of coal mining and coal-fired power on water resources.

It finds the amount of water consumed by coal mining and coal-fired power in NSW and Queensland is about 383bn litres a year, roughly equivalent to the household water needs of 5.2 million people."

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Read the complete The Guardian article 

 ' “While farmers recover from the last devastating drought and prepare for the next, each year the coal industry uses as much freshwater as every household in Queensland or the entire population of Sydney,” she said.

“When you add coal-fired electricity’s water consumption and contamination to its climate pollution, it’s clear Australia should rapidly replace coal-fired power with clean energy.

“Becoming a modern renewable energy nation will enable us to weather future shocks and become a safer, more sustainable and resilient country.”  '

‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal: Rolling Stone

'Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.” '

Read the Rolling Stone article