The climate crisis ravaging the planet, escalated by the burning of fossil fuels, is causing devastating cold weather in various regions with deadly consequences, writes Jane Marsh.
The death toll has soared from a severe winter storm that has put much of America into a deep freeze and turned one of the worst-hit US cities into a “war zone”.
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — A battering winter storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across the United States on Saturday, left millions more to worry about the prospect of further outages and crippled emergency response efforts and an airport in snowbound New York state.
California’s Air Resources Board has announced a wide-ranging set of plans aimed at taking the state to net carbon zero by 2045. This step will involve radically reducing the use of fossil fuels, to the point where any carbon dioxide they emit is less than or equal to the carbon absorbed, e.g., by the state’s forests and other carbon sinks. The unprecedented push for a rapid transition away from carbon emissions is likely the most ambitious in the world. If California were a country, it would have the fourth-highest nominal GDP in the world ahead of Germany, so it is a potential model for other industrialized communities.
A transition away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of power by 2050 will save the world $12 trillion, according to a new study published in Joule by Oxford researchers Rupert Way, Matthew C. Ives, Penny Mealy, and J. Doyne Farmer. Oxford’s press release points out that the paper foresees a 55% increase in power production that will be achieved by transitioning to renewables by 2050 and the authors think it is plausible for wind-solar-battery and hydro completely to replace fossil fuels by then.
Conservation biology finds itself in a terrifying place today, witness to mass extinction, helpless to stop the march of industrial Homo sapiens, the pillage of habitat, the loss of wildlands, and the impoverishment of ecosystems. Many of its leading figures are in despair. “I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked,” Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”
Ashe suggests that conservation biologists cease the empty claims about “saving the planet” with climate mitigation and start speaking truth: There is at present no plan, in any country, anywhere, on a global or national scale, to address extinctions, biodiversity crash, and habitat loss. The dismal reality is that with a green build-out, we will be saving not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one privileged domineering species that depends for its success on a nature-ravaging network of technological marvels. Only once this truth is understood can honest decisions be made about what kind of world humanity wishes to inhabit in the age of ecological disorder.
The COP27 climate change conference has been and gone. The ambitions were modest and the outcomes even more so. The large number of fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance did little to buyo the mood of impending doom. Story courtesy aapX.
Multiple catchments holding months of heavy rainfall paint an unfortunate picture of continued flooding for regional communities in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.
People living in the central-western NSW town of Forbes are reportedly being abandoned by insurers in the midst of a major flood disaster.
Forbes Mayor Phyllis Miller said some people with existing policies had received letters saying they would not be renewed, while others said insurers refused to covered them to begin with.
Ms Miller accused insurers of applying blanket bans on flood policies for the entire town, regardless of their actual flood risk.
“Of course, all of the town does not flood. We have hills in Forbes,” Ms Miller told ABC TV on Tuesday.
“There’s a moratorium on giving flood insurance to anyone [in the Forbes postcode].
The people of the Torres Strait Islands may soon be forced to leave their homelands if nothing is done to stop increasingly frequent catastrophic weather events and rising sea levels, writes James Fitzgerald Sice.
The nations of the world voted to terminate human civilisation and commit all our grandchildren to bake and starve on an uninhabitable ruin of a Planet.
Australia continues to trail other developed countries in addressing the climate crisis, in part due to the Albanese government’s support for new fossil fuel developments, according to an analysis released at the Cop27 UN conference in Egypt.
It’s small wonder a major fossil fuel producer like Australia has relied so heavily on carbon offsets. Plant new forests – or say you will avoid clearing old ones – and you can keep approving new gas and coal developments. This year, whistleblower Professor Andrew McIntosh claimed up to 80% of these offsets weren’t real. They didn’t actually offset emissions.
They point to the increased frequency and severity of weather-related disasters, producing “untold human suffering.” Human-driven global heating, especially in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the world average, has disrupted the stability of the jet stream. It sometimes jumps far north, and sometimes like a moebius strip it folds back on itself, producing deadly heat waves in unlikely places like Vancouver and drawing the monsoons up to flood Pakistan in biblical proportions. Europe, they point out, was set aflame this summer, while Australia (which was set aflame earlier) faced destruct
If you stand on the coast of Israel and gaze out across the Mediterranean Sea, you’ll spy deep-blue, calm waters that have sustained humans for millennia. Beneath the surface, though, something odd is unfolding: A process called stratification is messing with the way the sea processes carbon dioxide.
The systems under which humans exist are destroying the planet ergo the Human Race. Systemic change is required and Marx sent up a flare
Since 1970, the scientists find that the population of fresh water species has plunged by 83%, and the population of wildlife species over all has fallen 69%.
“The GigawattFactory combines innovative storage solutions, green hydrogen and future-proof power plants and makes environmentally friendly energy available as a secure service – this is a whole new quality in energy supply,” said LEAG CEO Thorsten Kramer, presenting the plan at the East German Energy Forum in Leipzig. “This will make us a pioneer in the safe energy transition.” The project will also be a powerful job engine for eastern Germany and help make energy affordable again, Kramer added.
Photovoltaic and wind power turbines will also be installed in LEAG’s former mining sites. The 7 GW hub will be able to supply four million households with green energy, said the company.
Is this a call to commoditise carbon pollution? Isn’t it the “regulated” free market that created the fucking problem in the first place? So this is really a call for “more regulation”? So why the illusion that it’s still a free market? Oh, I see to hide the need for a major change when major change is what’s needed more than ever and on a global and not just local scale.
Placing a value on the environment through formal well-regulated markets is a better way to effect climate action and change the behaviours destroying our planet, writes Mike Berwick.
La Niña is officially here for the third year in a row. You probably associate it with flooding, but how might it affect future drought and bushfires? And could a fourth La Niña be possible?
After weeks of anticipation, it’s finally official: the Bureau of Meteorology has declared another La Niña is underway. This means Australia’s east coast will likely endure yet another wet, and relatively cool, spring and summer.
It’s the third La Niña event in a row. This is rare, but not unheard of. Triple La Niñas have also occurred in, for example, 1973–1976 and 1998–2001.
The past two La Niñas mean water catchments are already full, and soils are sodden from Noosa in the north through to Lismore and the Hunter Valley in the south. It means more flood events are likely in the coming months.
The bureau’s declaration will be unwelcome news to many people – especially those in parts of New South Wales and Queensland still recovering from recent floods. So what else can flood-weary Australians expect in the coming months? And is a fourth La Niña on the cards?
our latter-day apocalypse will be driven by 15 tipping points affecting the earth’s climate. The sooner humanity stops burning coal, petroleum and fossil gas, the sooner a set of significant dangers will begin to recede. On the other hand, if the new British Prime Minister Liz Truss commits to extracting gas by hydraulic fracturing, she will lock in a significant increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere– carbon dioxide and methane.
David Armstrong McKay et al. have just published at Science an article surveying the 15 climate tipping points identified by the UN’s IPCC and the amount of extra warming that will trigger them. Here is the graphic they used to illustrate these tipping points:
Today, Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most-populous country, is fighting for its survival. This summer, erratic monsoon rains battered the country from north to south – Sindh, the southernmost province, received 464% more rain over the last few weeks than the 30-year average for the period.
Pakistan is undoubtedly on the front lines of climate change. In the ongoing flooding, it is clear that climate change has at minimum played a role in amplifying this event. At worst, it created a compounding set of circumstances causing millions of additional people to suffer than otherwise might have.
According to Murdoch commentators extreme weather events are occurring less often than they were in the past. I guess when new records are set the basis for a statement like that is that there is a new norm bench mark set. So there will always be fewer. Remember when Murdoch’s pundits kept advising us that the planet was cooling Andrew Bolt did that for well over a decade and telling us and that an increase in CO2 emissions were actually a boon to the planet.
Seas rising, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rising to best a million-year-old-record, super-monsoons. We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly.
What would Murdoch’s Sky News after Dark say? No proof it’s man-made? Or simply ignore the global extremes
floodwaters had swept away 700,000 livestock.Early estimates have put the flood damage at more than $US10 billion, the government has said, appealing to the world to help it deal with what it has called a man-made climate catastrophe.
If the world halted planet-heating pollution today, the ice sheet would lose more than 3% of its mass in the coming decades, scientists warn. To prevent even worse outcomes, immediate climate action is needed.
The good news is that the revolution we have all been waiting for is already happening. We just don’t hear much about it, as the fossil fuel industry has run a relentless fear campaign to protect their corporate interests. The truth is that change is already sweeping the world, from boardrooms to homes right across the planet.
This is humanity’s moment to right the wrongs of the past, to heal our relationship with each other and all life on Earth. It’s now time to meet the visionaries who are already showing us that another world is not only possible, but inevitable. And unstoppable.A new day is dawning.
Opinion | China Suffers Through ‘Worst Heatwave Ever Recorded’ | Andy Rowell
In a year when climate records—from floods, fire, and drought—are being shattered daily like shards of glass, there is one country that bests them all: China. The country is experiencing a heatwave like no other.
It has lasted over seventy days, with record breaking temperatures at day and at night.
Over 100 million people are affected in an area covering 500,000 square miles of the country, experiencing record temperatures exceeding 104°F (40°C). To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to the size of Texas, Colorado and California combined.
Experts are calling it the “worst heatwave ever recorded in global history,” or “Worst heat wave known in world climatic history.”
Sea life is facing two major challenges from the heat-trapping carbon dioxide we spew out when we drive internal combustion engine (ICE) cars or heat our homes and businesses with coal or fossil gas. Extra CO2 in the atmosphere prevents heat from the sun from radiating back out into space the way it used to before 1750, so instead it heats up the surface of the earth, whether dry land or the oceans. One challenge is that as carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, it makes the water more acidic. It is like throwing hydrochloric acid into your pet’s fish bowl.
While the research predicts “a potentially bleak future for many marine species,” the authors say it “also measures how much our oceans and the life within them stand to benefit from both climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis shows.
The oil and gas industry’s plan to convince the world to switch from natural gas to hydrogen made from natural gas is being upended by an unexpected cause: economics.As the climate emergency has gotten more and more impossible to ignore and the world has started moving away from natural gas, the industry has hyped a new technology: so-called blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when burned or converted into electricity, but the main component in producing blue hydrogen is methane, the most potent greenhouse gas.
A “great reallocation” of spending is needed to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050, modelling by Deloitte Access Economics shows.Some $20 trillion in forecast investments by Australian governments and industry by 2050 needs to be spent differently to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released on Thursday.But it is a transformation that Australia can afford, the research commissioned by the National Australia Bank shows.
The best way to Dutton-proof climate ambition is to deliver a solid proof of concept that widens the footprint of support for climate action in the Australian electorate, because if you widen the footprint, the scare campaigns aren’t as salient.
As climate change disrupts migration patterns, animals and the viruses they carry will come into unusual contact with each other — and inevitably with humans, unleashing new pandemics. The only thing that can stop this unfolding nightmare is a mass movement.
While Sky New’s unmade bed Rowan Dean and Andrew Bolt continue to deny any emergency is imminent due to man-made climate change the rest of the world suggests they are the fruit cakes. Murdoch media’s office windows were smashed in London for their refusal to even report on the global science in any balanced way simply for the sake of profit for their fossil fuel-based cash for comment denials,
The unprecedented heatwave and fires engulfing Europe might seem a long way away, but they are a frightening portent of what’s in store for Australia.
Britain has just experienced its highest temperature on record, extreme conditions and fires are sweeping Spain, Portugal, France and Greece. But this is just the latest in a string of extreme events globally. In March, scientists were shocked by record temperatures at both poles, including temperatures up to 40C above normal in the Antarctic and 30C above normal in the Arctic. In May, devastating heatwaves across India, Pakistan and surrounding countries led to weeks where temperatures in some regions repeatedly hit almost 50C. This year has also seen extreme heatwaves in south Asia, China and the US.
The Global Oceanic Environmental Survey, led by Edinburgh University marine biologist Howard Dryden at the university Roslin Innovation Centre had estimated that the plankton in the oceans had been halved in the past 40 years, and that all of it could be gone by 2040. Dryden and GOES were off by twenty years. Plankton is a blanket term for the billions of tiny sea organisms living close to the surface of the oceans, which are eaten by krill,
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s little Rowan Dean the unmade bed still keeps telling us it’s cold and wet outside.
The scorching temperatures have reached as far north as the UK, where its Met Office weather agency has issued its first-ever “red warning” of extreme heat for Monday and Tuesday, when temperatures in southern England may reach 40 degrees for the first time. That will still be relatively bearable compared with the 47 degrees recorded in Portugal’s northern town of Pinhao on Wednesday, establishing a new national record.
Britain’s Met Office weather forecaster has declared a national emergency, with temperatures early next week predicted to approach – and possibly exceed – record highs.“Exceptional, perhaps record-breaking, temperatures are likely on Monday, then again on Tuesday,” the Met Office said on their website.
Australia’s women are recognized and welcomed around the world. Plibersek and Wong are making a world of difference
French President Emmanuel Macron has singled out Australia’s new environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, in front of a global audience in Portugal, declaring that Australia was back in action on climate change.
No one laughs at God in a hospital but the LNP and Sky News After Dark do. Medicine like Climate science isn’t an exact but the Deniers appreciate and take advice from doctors if and when it suits their interests. When it doesn’t they become anti-vaxxers pout scream but still expect hospitals and doctors to take care of them and their children. Hospitals are dealing with more Covid now than ever before and now they blame Dan Andrews for giving them what they wanted. They check the weather forecasts and act accordingly but laugh at Climate science simply because it suits their interests to demand it to be exact not skeptical the very nature of the inquiry, research and it’s resulting predictions.
Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic. Our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, looks at the profound consequences to global climate if this Atlantic conveyor collapses entirely.
The new federal MP for the Queensland seat of Flynn was a founding member of a club formed to promote climate science denial, and was a signatory to an international statement claiming “there is no climate emergency”.
Morrison, Taylor Frydenberg and tha LNP will godown as Australia’s greatest liars on Climate Change
Australia produced 4.04 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person from coal-fired power stations last year, according to a new report by energy think tank Ember. That’s roughly four times the global average, double the average per person in countries like the US and Japan, and more than any other country in the G20 or the OECD. University of Adelaide energy economist Dr Liam Wagner said he was unsurprised by the ranking, given Australia has long been one of the world’s most coal-dependent countries.
Meanwhile for the sake of money the LNP, IPA, and News Corp deny the urgency just as they did the pandemic. They say we just have to live with it.
Climate scientists and concerned citizens are sounding the alarm as daily, weekly, and monthly records for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to be shattered while the fossil fuel-powered capitalist economic system responsible for skyrocketing greenhouse gas pollution plows ahead.
olddogthoughts 