A climate change conspiracy theorist has uncovered a set of strange patterns and repeated terminology in research papers, which he says is highly suspicious.
Australia has experienced its hottest year on record, its most intense flooding and an unprecedented coral bleaching — all in the last few years — as the climate warms, says a new report.
Change always has some fear and uncertainty attached to it. There is no way to determine ahead of time if the change will be successful and beneficial. However leaving the discussion to the ‘ideal’ time isn’t an option as there never will be an ‘ideal’ time. Soon after the 2020 bushfires, the pandemic arrived on our shores. While you could argue that a government should be able to address more than one issue at a time (another reason why Morrison’s concentration of power was concerning), as collective memory begins to fade it is harder to enact change. Former Prime Minister Howard understood this when enacting strict gun control measures soon after the Port Arthur murders in the early 1990s.
So maybe we should be having the discussion about becoming a republic now, in addition to the welcome discussion about climate change and emissions reduction. Rather than accept whatever happens, whether that be King Charles III and his heirs as our Head of State or constantly rebuilding parts of the country when they are destroyed by devastating flood, fire or cyclone, there is no better time than disruption to assess if the status quo is what we collectively want as a nation.
Climate scientists are very careful about attribution. But these scientists wrote, “we found that the 5-day maximum rainfall over the provinces Sindh and Balochistan is now about 75% more intense than it would have been had the climate not warmed by 1.2C, whereas the 60-day rain across the basin is now about 50% more intense, meaning rainfall this heavy is now more likely to happen.”
King Charles’s history of support for environmental projects and sustainable development has drawn the many conspiracies about his family into the Great Reset horror. The very people most keen to display their respect for the crown are torn by their climate denial loathing of anyone promoting policy to address the crisis. It will be interesting to see how they reconcile their ambivalence.
Meanwhile Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean, etal keep pumping out the notion that global science is just a hoax, a new religion, and that the planet isn’t subject to man-made climate change,or that the warming we are experiencing is in fact good for the planet, why? Because if we accepted otherwise CO2 emitters and producers might just have to change the course of history and forgo the profits they have been making.
Climate change has drastically affected water levels in famed rivers across Europe. Whole territories are vanishing with the current drought — possibly the worst in 500 years, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
With data, we can inform and guide our intuitions and overcome our natural focus on the local scale. To be convinced the climate is warming, we need to watch the long-term trends and expect the wiggles.
Australia’s Labor government is promising Pacific countries a new and friendlier era in diplomatic relations. But without challenging the vested interests and right-wing politics that dominate the region, these promises are altogether empty.
The new opposition Liberal Party leader (and previous immigration minister) Peter Dutton was famously caught on camera joking about the threat of rising seas to Pacific Islands. This was just one example of the “disrespect” Penny Wong has repeatedly referred to on her Pacific tour.
But Australia’s neglect of its climate commitments and the existential threat it continues to pose to its neighbors is not fundamentally an attitude problem. It’s a problem of interests.
Some 66 percent of German households are in favour of raising the top tax rate to finance climate action, according to a survey conducted by the ifo Institute in cooperation with the forsa opinion research institute. Researchers asked households about their preferences with regard to financing climate change policies.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently named Australia a “hold out” on setting stronger emissions reduction targets, writes Michael Mazengarb.
The Morrison government has gone missing again at a time of crisis and devastation, despite its disaster relief fund brimming with $4.8bn. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet finally made it to the outskirts of Lismore on the weekend, vowing support, visibly shaken at the magnitude of the devastation. Why the failure of governments to respond in times of crisis, asks resident Robyn Fitzgerald. Why no mention of “climate change”?
Peter Dutton runs a Go Fund Me Campaign for flood victims in order to try to save the Government. That’s standard for an IQ like his.
Climatic trends, extreme conditions and sea level rise are already hitting many of Australia’s ecosystems, industries and cities hard. As climate change intensifies, we are now seeing cascading and compounding impacts and risks, including where extreme events coincide. These are placing even greater pressure on our ability to respond. While the work of adaptation has begun, we have found the progress is uneven and insufficient, given the risks we face. These findings are from our work as co-authors of the new Australia and New Zealand chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report on Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation, released today.
Elections bring on desperate changes and sometimes common sense is an accidental outcome.
So, if you want action against major gas companies controlling Australian politicians, a red-hot climate denier may still be worth some attention.
Hanson went so far as to propose a government-owned enterprise instead of paying private companies to do the same job. “If we’re going to pay $2.3 billion to secure Australia’s fuel supply, the government should buy the Brisbane refinery in Lytton and let it become an asset owned by the Commonwealth.” Hanson continually references Norway’s Sovereign Health Fund having “struck the right chord for its citizens, earning $1.5 trillion from its commodities.” “Australia, on the other hand, last year took a measly $300 million in direct payments for $50 billion worth of gas off the North West Shelf” while “the tiny nation of Qatar has a different approach. It receives around $26 billion in royalties on the gas it exports.” Qatar trades slightly less gas and hydrocarbon products than Australia.
China isn’t gods gift to gas which isn’t as clean as the LNP make out.
“They have one view for investors, and then another view when they want to ask the government for money. They talk completely different messages out of both sides of their mouths, constantly. It’s incredible. And somehow still seem to convince everyone of the narrative for how useful gas is.”
Mountain glaciers are essential water sources for nearly a quarter of the global population. But figuring out just how much ice they hold – and how much water will be available as glaciers shrink in a warming world – has been notoriously difficult. In a new study, scientists mapped the speed of over 200,000 glaciers to get closer to an answer. They discovered that widely used estimates of glacier ice volume may be off by about 20% in terms of how much Earth’s glaciers outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could contribute to sea level rise. Mathieu Morlighem, a leader in ice sheet modeling and a coauthor of the study, explains why the new results hold a warning for regions that rely on glaciers’ seasonal meltwater, but barely register in the big picture of rising seas.
Whilst Labor’s policies are preferable to the Coalition’s, they fall far short of what must be done. We cannot afford the timidity shown by the two major parties who bow to pressure from vested interests and are paralysed by fear of reprisal from their colleagues as much as from the electorate. Nor can we afford the denial from Barnaby’s mob and the Pauline and Clive cults. When Labor form government, the necessity for action will only be greater and the voices demanding it even louder. I hope they are ready.
Klein is a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and the author of many books on climate change, including her latest, “How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.”
Like most comedies, “Don’t Look Up” is probably best seen in theaters. But be prepared: As in “Dr. Strangelove,” the depth of comedy of “Don’t Look Up” is matched by a subtle, profound grief. The end of the movie is unbearably poignant; in particular, Lawrence delivers one line that is clearly the filmmakers explaining why they made this, even if it turns out to be completely futile. There may be a few movies that will make you laugh more and some that make you cry more, but if you add the laughing and crying together, it’s hard to think of anything that puts more emotional points on the board.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says his long-awaited net-zero plan will lower power bills, create 100,000 jobs, and leave Australians thousands of dollars better off by increasing the gross national income by 1.6 per cent.
But his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull has been scathing of a key pillar of the plan, calling carbon capture and storage – which the government is relying on to cut emissions in manufacturing and mining – as a “con” and “distraction” by the coal industry. Scott Morrison announces the net zero plan. “It is a proven failure and it keeps getting run up the flagpole by the fossil fuel sector as a way to defer action,” Mr Turnbull told The New Daily. Mr Morrison will take the net-zero plan, and a projection that Australia will comfortably beat its Paris agreement goals, to Glasgow’s COP26 climate summit this week.
There are three ways to approach climate change – one, do nothing and hope; two, dig in, and go slow, because it’s ‘the economy, stupid’; or three, step into the change and maximise the opportunities it presents.
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language. The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success. Billboards featured the prime minister as a “Coal-o-phile Dundee,” mercilessly mocked Australia’s climate policies and responses to the murderously scorching bushfires of 2020.
As things stand, it is a wonder Prime Minister Scott Morrison is even bothering. The Australian delegation in Glasgow is bound to be poorly briefed, confused and barely able. The coalition government, still weighed down by fossil-fuel fantasists, will continue to be engaged in a battle of such stunning incoherence any undertakings on carbon neutrality and change can only be regarded as unreliable and disingenuous. As McKenzie and a few of her lobotomised colleagues would have you believe, climate change is something that happens to other people. In the meantime, fossil fuel socialists the world over, unite!
I am struck by the irony that if only the US had invested massively in renewable energy and electric vehicles right from the 1970s when the climate crisis had become clear to scientists, Washington may not have felt the need to invade Iraq to unleash its hydrocarbon resources. When Ronald Reagan took back down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House, he was symbolically committing this country to generations of energy wars.
Australia is becoming a pariah on the world stage when it comes to climate policy. From initially refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, to remaining dependent on coal, successive Australian governments have repeatedly adopted policies that put them at odds with their foreign counterparts. Ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, here’s what world leaders and environmentalists have said about Australia’s climate change track record.
Why on earth would a climate-change-denying PM who shows 100% support for the filthy, polluting coal-mining and environmentally destructive gas fracking industries attend the COP26 (climate change conference) in Glasgow? Wasn’t this the same fool who dragged a piece of coal into Parliament House and declared – in front of a gleeful Barnyard Joyce – that “there is nothing to be afraid of – it’s just coal! Nothing to see here!” It came as no surprise that the yellow-bellied coward, Sloth Morrison, slunk away and returned back to Australia right before the conference even started! Why? Because he knew that his climate-change-denying ideology will be held up for ridicule on the world stage at any international summit on the emergency to address important issues on a subject the LNP do not believe in! That is exactly the type of disgraceful, cowardly behaviour we have come to expect from a useless, non-achieving PM who expends more energy trying to get out of work and totally avoiding any of his responsibilities as one of the highest paid “leaders” in the free world!
The gas development in the Beetaloo Basin is guaranteed to accelerate and worsen climate change impacts on our health, writes Dr David Shearman. AUSTRALIA IS A global pariah for its unapologetic fossil fuel stance, in the face of the recent IPCC code red warning on climate change.
My thought for the day The ability of thinking human beings to blindly embrace what they are being told without referring to evaluation and the consideration of scientific fact, truth and reason, never ceases to amaze me. It is tantamount to the rejection of rational explanation. (John Lord )
Our political leaders will do anything to stay in positions of power, including deceiving the voting public on urgent matters of climate change, writes Sue Arnold. PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT issue facing this nation is not the pandemic, economic scenarios or nuclear submarines but a perilous lack of critical thinking and analysis by political parties, the mainstream media and a large majority of Australians.
Xi’s announcement signals the end of coal-fired power plant development outside China. Developing countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, seen until recently as sources of future demand growth for coal, are now taking part in a program in which the Asian Development Bank will buy coal-fired plants with the sole purpose of shutting them down. At least as significant and somewhat more surprising has been a renewed commitment to limit the development of coal-fired power in China itself. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Government’s central planning agency, has released a new plan on energy consumption that includes requiring all provinces to review already permitted high-emissions projects, including those under construction. Combined with the emissions trading market launched in July, this development suggests that Xi’s stated goal of reaching a peak in China’s coal consumption by 2026 may well be reached. China pushes for a cleaner climate China pushes for a cleaner climate Despite escalating tensions between nations, China is taking positive steps towards reaching net-zero carbon emission targets. The final development of the past week has been
Phillip Morris also announced it was to become the world’s foremost Anti-Smoking Corporation far surpassing any government QUIT campaigns
The calculated change of heart within Murdoch’s non-news machine will do little to editorially rein in the likes of Bolt and his merry denialists, many of whom have promised to keep the cannons firing and the fires burning. As they do, climate change inactivism, code to preserve fossil fuel orthodoxy, promises to bloom.
They don’t call it Fox for nothing. This is hardly a shift but a slight move sideways brought on by advertisers and the BCA. Murdoch has joined the Fossil fuel companies that now claim are leading the pack in new decarbonizing technologies. They are the new leaders of science moving forward. The new alchemists as the tobacco companies have claimed for years. Don’t expect any mea culpas from the likes of Andrew Bolt paid to confuse us with slinging bullshit.
But there is reason to be doubtful. Only a month ago, in response to the latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, News Corp commentator Andrew Bolt repeatedly chose to mock it with arguments that would not stand up in a high school science class, including the bizarre claim that “if a warming world is better for plants, why not for humans?” It’s hard to imagine him changing. As the COVID pandemic has shown, listening to the science can save many millions of lives. While there has been no shortage of fringe voices spreading coronavirus misinformation, they have largely been ignored and sidelined by the mainstream media. It’s to the enduring shame of News Corp that, on climate change, those voices were instead welcomed in.
Louisiana’s petroleum refineries are out of action in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Refineries run on electricity, and electricity has been knocked out in New Orleans and environs, perhaps for another couple of weeks. Here’s the kicker: Louisiana refineries account for nearly 1/5 of America’s refining capacity. Raw crude oil is just sludge, it is useless until it is refined. Then it becomes gasoline, diesel and other fuels.
The building blocks of new-variant capitalism are already there. Governments are going to tax and spend more, and they will use regulatory powers to weaken monopolies. There will be selective use of nationalisation – as happened with UK defence manufacturer Sheffield Forgemasters this week. Another roaring 20s? We need to do better than that Dan Davies Read more Governments will borrow money to invest in infrastructure projects and to increase the budget for science. Industrial and regional policies will be back in vogue. The idea is to harness the power of the state with the dynamism of the private sector and, as was the case with Keynes, to save capitalism from itself.
Like I said, it’s obvious really. I once said that when I first bought a home, I one day hoped to live in a million dollar property. Little did I realise that it would happen without me moving. I also imagined that it would be a beachfront property. Given the way climate change action is happening, that might also happen without me moving, too
Just days before it was hit with catastrophic floods, Henan endured a major heatwave, Bloomberg noted Wednesday. “The deadly flood shows the unpredictable impacts from climate change are appearing more and more often,” Zhang Jianyu, chief representative at the Environmental Defense Fund’s Beijing office, told the news outlet. “It’s a message to us that it’s time to strengthen efforts to tackle [the] climate change crisis.”
There’s still time to mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, but it will require an informed and engaged public to push for action. To that end, news outlets must commit to sustained coverage of climate change and its potential solutions and to challenge industries, policymakers, and public officials who continue to drag their feet and ignore the demands of millions of Americans who are increasingly concerned about how climate change will harm their lives.
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