Andrew Bolt ( swinger no longer a denier) of climate change that is, reminds us that one day doesn’t prove man made climate change isn’t a religion but one cold day does. Every summer Australia’s self professed and News Corp ordained opinionator goes into hiding until it gets cooler. (ODT)
The Kimberley region of Western Australia is the one location that could break heat records on Christmas Day, with the town of Fitzroy Crossing expecting a maximum of 47C, breaking the previous annual record of 46.5C, which was set earlier this month.
Inland areas of South Australia will have temperatures in the low-to-mid 40s and Adelaide is forecast to reach 41C on Thursday.
Parts of Victoria are forecast to reach temperatures above 40C towards the end of the week, with Mildura in the state’s north-west expecting a top of 46C on Sunday.
Problem Trump is finding less sympathy in the US among the States. Why is Australia the 52nd State of America? (ODT)
Trump administration officials at high-stakes climate talks offered an unapologetic defence of fossil fuels on Monday, arguing that a rapid retreat from coal, oil and gas was unrealistic.
While that stance brought scorn from environmentalists and countries that favour stronger action to fight global warming, there are signs that the administration is finding a receptive audience among other major fossil-fuel producers, including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
Earth’s average surface temperature from January to October 2018 was one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1850-1900 baseline.
Long-term warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide (CO2) cast off when fossil fuels are burned to produce energy.
Seventeen of the hottest years on record have occurred since the start of the 21st century, with 2018 ranking as the 4th warmest.
– 405.5 ppm –
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached 405.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2017, the highest in at least three million years and a 45 percent jump since the preindustrial era.
The last time CO2 was at that level, oceans were 10-20 metres higher.
The big question of climate change is no longer why it’s happening (humans have a wild fossil-fuel-burning habit) nor when it’s going to happen (it is happening). These days, it’s how are we going to build a civilization that can survive climate change—and how can we adapt in a way that doesn’t leave out whole segments of the population.
Leaders of the Group of 20 agreed Saturday to fix the world trading system after difficult, all-night talks in the Argentine capital, but only 19 of them agreed to support the Paris accord on fighting climate change with the United States the lone holdout.
Trump officials are minimizing warnings from scientists by arguing they are exaggerated and based on the worst-case scenario. They say the National Climate Assessment (NCA) – an expansive federal government report on the dangers of climate change in the US – considers only the highest possible levels of greenhouse gas emissions.“If you take the extreme case, you’re right, it’s dire,” Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, said on Fox News. “If you take the best case, it’s not much.”
Of Zinke’s comments, Pennsylvania University climate scientist Michael Mann said “there is no truth to [them] whatsoever”. He added: “The report looked at an extremely wide range of scenarios.
Global temperatures in 2018 are set to be the fourth highest on record, the UN said Thursday, stressing the urgent need for action to rein in runaway warming of the planet.
In a report released ahead of the COP 24 climate summit in Poland, the World Meteorological Organization pointed out that the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, and that “2018 is on course to be the 4th warmest year on record.”
“This would mean that the past four years – 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 – are also the four warmest years in the series,” the UN agency said in its provisional report on the state of the climate this year.
The “warming trend is obvious and continuing,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas told reporters in Geneva.
The report shows that the global average temperature for the first 10 months of the year was nearly 1.0-degree Celsius above the pre-industrial era (1850-1900).
This is despite the fact that, its then-editor, Chris Mitchell, said eight years ago: “for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact”.
But last week, the paper gave columnist Michael Asten more than 400 square centimetres, for an article of well over 900 words, to argue there are massive divisions about the science.
To be fair, he probably did not write the headline:
And why does The Australian continue to publish articles designed to raise doubts about anthropogenic climate change and the urgent need to tackle it when it does not provide similar support for tobacco lobbyists and flat-earthers?
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday just moments after President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser and noted Wall Street stooge Larry Kudlow dismissed a new United Nations climate report showing that the world must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 to avert global catastrophe, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) denounced the White House for its “dangerous” rejection of climate science and slammed Trump for working hand-in-hand with Big Oil to make “a bad situation worse.”
So, there we have it, the UN the IPCC and the scientists who have prepared 6,000 research papers, on the subject, are urging action on climate change. We have been told that we need to remove extreme right-wing governments to be replaced by more progressive thinking governments prepared to take up the challenge.
The solution then for this new government and, mechanism to gain across the board public support, would be a positive response. This aims at atmospheric Co2 management including, in particular, carbon capture at point of emission, removing Co2 from the atmosphere, reforestation, incentive-based emission reduction guidelines, electricity storage and support for alternative energy.
This has been promised by the Labor if they win the next election. Both government and big business need to take affirmative action on behalf of each and every one of us. If the fossil fuel industry wishes to survive they need to participate and work towards reducing or eliminating their carbon footprint.
The IPCC issued its bleakest report yet this week, saying that without drastic changes, the world doesn’t have a hope of avoiding uncontrollable climate change.
Unless emissions are halved within 12 years and virtually eliminated by 2050, temperature increases will likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius.
Beyond 2 degrees, scientists predict temperature increases may spiral as the climate breaches a series of unique tipping points, such as the melting of the permafrost.
The top culprit is fossil fuels, and the instructions to Australia and the rest of the world are clear: Quit coal by 2050.
Mensa Master Price doesn’t need to study or peer review any reports by the world’s foremost science experts on the matter. She’s a Liberal MP (ODT)
Federal Environment Minister Melissa Price has argued some of the world’s leading climate scientists are “drawing a long bow” in calling for an end to coal power in a bid to limit global warming.
Whoever wins the next election is going to face a monumental task to reduce our emissions in order to tackle the existential threat posed by climate change.
In one way, it would serve Scott Morrison right to have to face the consequences of his lies. But the country cannot afford someone who thinks prayer is the answer to the drought.
Our Prime Minister, the man charged with making the decisions on how to keep us safe, is a bald-faced liar.
“It’s the biggest peer-review exercise there is,” says Jonathan Lynn, head of communications for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It involves hundreds or even thousands of people looking at it.”
It must not only tell governments what we know about climate change – but how close they have brought us to the edge. And by implication, how much those governments are failing to live up to their goals for the planet, set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
The chart compares a country’s social cost of carbon to its share of global emissions. The radiating lines show the ratios of a country’s share of global emissions to its share of the damages.
The United States is almost balanced, with its high social cost of carbon roughly proportional to how much carbon dioxide it emits. But India pumps out just 6 percent of global greenhouse gases and will bear more than 20 percent of the global economic burden from climate change. In other words, India faces almost quadruple the damages of global warming compared to its contribution to the problem. Zoom in further and you’ll notice that many of the wealthiest countries in the world stand to bear the lowest costs of climate change.
This is part of why the global social cost of carbon, $417 per ton, is so much higher than it is for any individual country. The costs of climate change are greater than the sum of their parts. Yet it also shows that many of the wealthiest countries, which contributed the most greenhouse gases, stand to be the best insulated from its costs.
That makes climate change a global justice concern. In limiting global warming, wealthy countries face a moral imperative to look beyond their borders and GDPs, pushing even harder to cut their own emissions. The social costs of carbon also show why climate change really has to be tackled as a global problem rather than by individual nations. But as long as countries like Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany face little financial fallout, that policy case becomes much harder to make.
Recognizing that it’s the right thing to do — both for their local economies and for the world we’re leaving to our children — U.S. states are now leading the charge on clean energy. Already this year, New Jersey voted to establish a target of 50 percent by 2030. Colorado regulators approved a plan from the state’s largest utility to move to 55 percent renewable energy by 2026. California, the world’s fifth largest economy, just joined Hawaii in making an impressive commitment to 100 percent clean power by 2045. Florida’s solar development soared to make it the nation’s second biggest growth market in the first quarter of this year. In fact, six of the top 10 solar growth markets were states that have Republican governors. Texas has continued to dominate the U.S. wind market.
Reflecting on the many different people and places of America’s clean energy success story, two things are clear. First, that our love of homegrown renewable energy is one thing that unites this divided country. And second, despite headwinds from Washington, states can and will power our country with clean energy.
Does the Coalition really think it is on the right track ignoring farmers, scientists, tourism operators, firefighters, surf lifesavers, the Australian Defence Force and 73% of the Australian public on climate change? Simon Black reports.
State legislators passed an anti-science law after a 2010 report warned global warming would cause devastating sea-level rise. Now, as a hurricane makes landfall, local experts demand policy change and urgent action
Building on actions that kicked off earlier this week, activists on Saturday hosted hundreds of #RiseForClimate demonstrations across all seven continents, drawing massive crowds “to demand our local leaders commit to building a fossil-free world that puts people and justice before profits.”
As of this writing there were more than 900 actions in 95 countries, according to the searchable database that enables those interested to locate protests in their area.
The main event was the Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice march in San Francisco, California, which is brought together some 30,000 people and is being hailed as the West Coast’s largest climate march ever.
Climate Change (IPCC)—has been at the forefront of warning humanity about the processes and dangers of human-caused global warming, there has been simply too much “reticence and caution” that has led researchers to downplay the most “extreme and damaging outcomes” that lurk beneath their publicly stated findings and pronouncements.
While this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely.
This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points – passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system – such as melting polar ice sheets (and hence increasing sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are nonlinear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.
The extreme risks which these tipping points represent justify strong precautionary risk management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.
“Either we act with unprecedented speed,” Spratt and Dunlop conclude, “or we face a bleak future.”
Stockholm (AFP) – Researchers expressed concern Thursday about the rapid pace of climate change, after a glacier on Sweden’s Kebnekaise mountain melted so much in sweltering Arctic temperatures that it is no longer the country’s highest point.
“It’s quite scary,” Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist, a Stockholm University geography professor who has been measuring the glacier for many years as part of climate change research, told AFP.
Extreme heatwaves, droughts, raging fires. What we are observing is climate change in action. The debate is over.
by Nick Miller
The Global Warming Policy Forum in Britain has striven greatly to sow doubt on climate science and counted high-profile politicians in its ranks. It has hosted former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard. The former said climate change, if it existed, was “probably doing good” and the latter dismissed global warming as a “religion” and the “latest progressive cause”.
“It just doesn’t make sense any more in 2018 and, in the middle of this summer, it just isn’t good enough any more to just frame the debate ‘is climate change real?’
“If you ask an adult of 30 years or older how was it like when you were young, they can tell the difference themselves. It’s the same story all around the world.” and we can all now observe it.
“As long as the BBC and other media give the impression that there is any significant doubt about this … then people won’t take action.”
It’s part of a bigger trend: extremists have weaponised free speech, insisting on platforms to publicly debate the absurd, to spread conspiracy theories and clog up sane debate. Any move to ignore them is branded censorship.
Professor Michael Mann has stated: “Extreme weather has struck across Europe, from the Arctic Circle to Greece, and across the world, from North America to Japan. “This is the face of climate change,” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, and one the world’s most eminent climate scientists. “We literally would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change.””
The issue with increased greenhouse gases and warm Oceans is that they do not rapidly change when mitigating strategies are employed. Greenhouse gases can take centuries to dissipate. Through a business as usual approach there is a continuing to increase in the release of greenhouse gases creating warmth in Oceans and Atmosphere. According to Frydenberg, Canavan, Joyce, Abbott, Kelly et al, these views are held by people holding an extreme left-wing ideology. But, a more rational view is that climate science is underpinned by Physics and Chemistry and other science disciplines. Climate science is independent of political ideology.
Already millions of people have been killed by fossil fuel emissions, we are now observing numerous people being killed by extreme events in Western countries caused through climate change.
“Droughts are getting hotter because the planet is warming,” says Gergis, who spent a decade studying accounts and records of the country’s weather. “It’s not just natural variability that we are dealing with any more.”
In her book she also cites the CSIRO and the bureau’s Climate Change in Australia, that projects average temperature increases of about 4 degrees compared with the 1986-2005 baseline for much of eastern Australia by 2090 if global carbon emissions continue unabated. For Victoria, Tasmania and south-western WA, the temperate rise will be closer to 3.5 degrees.
The annual State of the Climate Report, compiled by more than 450 scientists from over 60 countries, describes worsening climate conditions worldwide in 2017, the same year that US President Donald Trump pulled out of the landmark Paris climate deal.
The United States is the world’s second leading polluter after China, but has rolled back environmental safeguards under Trump, who has declared climate change a “Chinese hoax” and exited the Paris deal signed by more than 190 nations as a path toward curbing harmful emissions.
The 300-page report issued by the American Meteorological Society and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mentioned the word “abnormal” a dozen times, referring to storms, droughts, scorching temperatures and record low ice cover in the Arctic.
“Respected coral scientists have documented in peer-reviewed journals that most of the world’s coral reefs will not survive unless the global temperature increase is limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels,” it said.
However WWF-Australia head of oceans Richard Leck said Australia’s emissions reduction efforts were not even in line with limiting warming to 2°.
He cited a 2017 report by the United Nations environment program that found Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions were set to far exceed its pledge under the Paris accord. This agreement aims to limit global temperature rises this century to well below 2° and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°.
“Our research shows a significant link between air pollution and diabetes globally,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University, said in a news release. Pollution is thought to reduce insulin production and trigger inflammation, preventing the body from converting blood glucose into energy.
Al-Aly and his colleagues estimate that pollution contributed to 3.2 million new cases of diabetes globally in 2016, representing about 14 percent of all global diabetes cases that year. They also estimate that 8.2 million years of healthy life were lost in 2016 due to pollution-linked diabetes, representing about 14 percent of all healthy years lost due to diabetes of any cause.
The AEF’s YouTube channel has just 11 subscribers and has posted only one video, from December 2016.
In May 2017, the AEF lent its logo to a letter to US President Donald Trump to offer “enthusiastic support” for his commitments to withdraw from the UN Paris climate agreement. But between July 2017 and February 2018, there was virtually nothing posted on its website.
Much of that website, including the “Climate News” section, is content from former Institute of Public Affairs fellow Alan Moran and postings that variously dismiss human-caused climate change and renewable energy, in particular wind power.
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Ridd has been a director at the AEF since 2005. That’s a neat segue into the AEF’s history.
In late 2004, the Institute of Public Affairs – by then already pushing out climate science misinformation – held its “Eureka forum” to work out how to push back against “environmental fundamentalism” that, it claimed, was “denying farmers, foresters, fishermen, prospectors, miners, beekeepers, 4WD enthusiasts and others access rights, property rights, water rights”.
Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tonnes of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels half a millimetre every year, a team of 80 scientists has reported.
The rate of melting has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realised, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than they had hoped.
Record temperatures have been recorded in many European countries. Germany, Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Croatia all reported the warmest May in at least a century. The Netherlands experienced the warmest May in 300 years.
There is no sign of the weather pattern changing any time soon, with warm air expected to continue across much of central and southern Europe as well as the associated threat of thunderstorms.
![A sunset in Dresden. This May was the warmest in Germany since 1889 and comes after the warmest April since records began in 1881. [Filip Singer/EPA]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2018/6/5/3583c89b0b124d7fa879f7472c386f20_8.jpg)
