Soon after the fire that destroyed whole towns in Victoria I made a comment that one Tasmanian politician saw as inappropriate in the circumstances.
With thousands of people homeless and so much property destroyed, plus the horror of many lives lost, apparently it was only a time to be tactful and thoughtful for the victims. So when is it an appropriate time to highlight issues? When politicians are replete with their own self-satisfaction from having got through another year without damaging their re-election prospects, or when there is a major issue at the forefront of public attention that may allow them to put their intelligence and our money to good use by making the world a better and safer place to live in?
Now Tasmania has more property destroyed, more shattering loss, and what will we get? Another comparison with the 1967 fires (an annual media issue) and maybe a consultancy report so politicians can say they have spent some money on preventing a recurrence. Hooray. Another sop to the gullible public.
With ‘world leaders’ recently concurring on inaction on the issue of climate change, we can only expect more disasters. Clearly not everyone believes we are heading for the inferno of a 4 - 6 degrees rise in world temperatures. But after hearing of the effects of climate change from several people in Indonesia, including a taxi driver whose passion on the subject got past the barrier of no shared language, I suggest this stubborn disbelief is a product of ‘civilization’; even if no insurance, Australian disaster victims are guaranteed government relief quickly. Also the assistance of the many public spirited people who really go out of their way to help.
No waiting for Red Cross, or any of the many other disaster relief NGOs that provide the only help in less civilized countries, to arrive. No lack of medical facilities, clean water, food or shelter for the victims here. If that help wasn’t so readily available, would there be a louder voice from “civilized” countries to turn this disaster around while we still have the chance?
Jo McRae is a qualified Library Technician, currently volunteer Librarian and editor for environmental groups. After her daughter’s death age 26 in 2012 she went to Indonesia to assist LePMIL, Linda’s NGO, to finish her environmental movie project in Sulawesi. This has led Jo to studying Indonesian at University. With fluent Bahasa Indonesia (!!!) Jo will return to Sulawesi to continue Linda’s work. For more information see Kendari Dreaming blog. To donate to the Linda McRae Dreaming Fund see Heaven Address http://www.heavenaddress.com.
• George Monbiot, The Guardian, Heatwave: Australia’s new weather demands a new politics
450 times after starting his observations on early TT Mark is having a lengthy break. Here’s his final offering ... also toons, here
Photograph: Kim Foale/EPA
I wonder what Tony Abbott will say about the record heatwave now ravaging his country.
The Australian opposition leader has repeatedly questioned the science and impacts of climate change. He has insisted that “the science is highly contentious, to say the least” and asked – demonstrating what looks like a wilful ignorance – “If man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn’t there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph?”
He has argued against Australian participation in serious attempts to cut emissions.
Climate change denial is almost a national pastime in Australia. People such as Andrew Bolt and Ian Plimer have made a career out of it. The Australian – owned by Rupert Murdoch – takes such extreme anti-science positions that it sometimes makes the Sunday Telegraph look like the voice of reason.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal – the most carbon intensive fossil fuel. It’s also a profligate consumer. Australians now burn, on average, slightly more carbon per capita than the citizens of the United States, and more than twice as much as the people of the United Kingdom. Taking meaningful action on climate change would require a serious reassessment of the way life is lived there.
Events have not been kind to the likes of Abbott, Bolt and Plimer. The current heatwave – so severe that the Bureau of Meteorology has been forced to add a new colour to its temperature maps – is just the latest event in a decade of extraordinary weather: weather of the kind that scientists have long warned is a likely consequence of man-made global warming.
As James Hansen and colleagues showed in a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the occurrence of extremely hot events has risen by a factor of around 50 by comparison to the decades before 1980. Extreme summer heat, which afflicted between 0.1% and 0.2% of the world 40 years ago, now affects 10%. They warned that “an important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3σ) warmer than the climatology of the 1951–1980 base period”. An extremely hot outlier is a good description of what is roasting Australia at the moment.
So far Abbott has commented, as far as I can tell, only on the fires: “Our thoughts are with the people and the communities across the country who are impacted by the bushfires,” he says. Quite right too, but it’s time his thoughts also extended to the question of why this is happening and how Australian politicians should respond. He says he’s currently on standby with his local fire brigade, but as his opposition to effective action on climate change is likely to contribute to even more extreme events in the future, this looks like the most cynical kind of stunt politics.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/08/australia-heatwave-weather
• Ian Lowe, smh: It’s happening, just like climate scientists said it would
• Christine Milne press conference audio
Australian Greens leader Senator Christine Milne held a press conference to discuss climate change, welcoming the scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who are meeting in Hobart this week; and also commented on Newstart, the mining tax and gun control.
Please follow the link to the website for the audio file:
http://greensmps.org.au/content/audio/christine-milne-press-conference-climate-change-ipcc-newstart-mining-tax-gun-control
• ABC Online: Sign of the Times, here
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Comments (13)
An excellent but disturbing argument Jo. It’s not only Abbott but Labor as well. Against her own espoused beliefs (and remember she tricked Rudd into dropping his scheme simply to undermine him for her own personal ends), Gillard has set up carbon pricing, at a ridiculously inadequate level, only because the Greens and Independents forced her to.
Of course people don’t wan’t to change their lifestyle but with proper leadership as exmplified in Rudd and Turnbull people were prepared to make sacrifices: climate change was on top of their electoral priorities. Then followed the relentless campaign from the extreme right, financed in very large part by the mining industry (note the Sunday nights SBS programme)and channelled by virtually all the mass media. Rustle up a few rogue scientists, some with links to the fossil fuel and mining industries, and demand in the best post-modern manner that they have equal time with the remaining 97 per cent of scientists, then call carbon pricing ‘a great big toxic tax’, and the public becomes confused. What three years ago was seen as a top priority is now seen by too many people as just an unwanted tax on an issue on which there is no consensus. And so we continue with the status quo, its dangers to our very planet being swept under the corporate carpet.
Ona answer can only be courageous leadership, ready to draw the obviously conclusions that Jo has descried, so that voters can see again just how serious this is. And then for Gaia’s sake act!
Given the quality of the political team Planet Earth has put up to combat climate change, let’s find an intergalactic bookie to take bets on the outcome.
With the infinite size and poor communications across the universe, there’s bound to be mugs out there willing to put serious dough on the survival of H sapiens.
John Hayward
The idiots have only so long in which to govern, the mass shrill will be their death knell in the not too distant future.
You right wing corporate facists are going the way of your dollar - down!
Yes doom and gloom is what we have to look forward to. Currently we have not elected the low emissions path so we can expect a higher emissions outcome. Already we have reached the tipping point that guarantees multiple metres of sea level rise, extinction for may coastal ecosystems including some full of humans even if we stop right now, which doen’t appear to be about to happen. Sea front property values in Byron Bay are being affected and this will spread.
On the positive horizon the movement to disinvest in coal is growing.
Global Warming Has Increased Monthly Heat Records Worldwide by a Factor of Five, Study Finds
Jan. 14, 2013 — Monthly temperature extremes have become much more frequent, as measurements from around the world indicate. On average, there are now five times as many record-breaking hot months worldwide than could be expected without long-term global warming, shows a study now published in Climatic Change. In parts of Europe, Africa and southern Asia the number of monthly records has increased even by a factor of ten. 80 percent of observed monthly records would not have occurred without human influence on climate, concludes the authors-team of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Complutense University of Madrid.
“The last decade brought unprecedented heat waves; for instance in the US in 2012, in Russia in 2010, in Australia in 2009, and in Europe in 2003,” lead-author Dim Coumou says. “Heat extremes are causing many deaths, major forest fires, and harvest losses—societies and ecosystems are not adapted to ever new record-breaking temperatures.” The new study relies on 131 years of monthly temperature data for more than 12,000 grid points around the world, provided by NASA. Comprehensive analysis reveals the increase in records.
The researchers developed a robust statistical model that explains the surge in the number of records to be a consequence of the long-term global warming trend. That surge has been particularly steep over the last 40 years, due to a steep global-warming trend over this period. Superimposed on this long-term rise, the data show the effect of natural variability, with especially high numbers of heat records during years with El Niño events. This natural variability, however, does not explain the overall development of record events, found the researchers.
Natural variability does not explain the overall development of record events
If global warming continues, the study projects that the number of new monthly records will be 12 times as high in 30 years as it would be without climate change. “Now this doesn’t mean there will be 12 times more hot summers in Europe than today—it actually is worse,” Coumou points out. For the new records set in the 2040s will not just be hot by today’s standards. “To count as new records, they actually have to beat heat records set in the 2020s and 2030s, which will already be hotter than anything we have experienced to date,” explains Coumou. “And this is just the global average—in some continental regions, the increase in new records will be even greater.”
“Statistics alone cannot tell us what the cause of any single heat wave is, but they show a large and systematic increase in the number of heat records due to global warming,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a co-author of the study and co-chair of PIK’s research domain Earth System Analysis. “Today, this increase is already so large that by far most monthly heat records are due to climate change. The science is clear that only a small fraction would have occurred naturally.”
Science Daily reports on the math.
Yep, a third go. Lloyd in The Australian clings to a published paper testing the link between the last 100 years and current sea level rise to question if it is driven by changes to the climate.
Why not focus on the paper that links the behaviour of sea level over the last 40 million years in relation to the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The physics are inescapable, when CO2 reaches around 400ppmv the sea level rises multiple metres on todays level. Yes there is a lead time between the warming gases presence in the atmosphere, the warming and the subsequent sea level rise.
it’s nice for scientists to make their points in the competition in academia, for tenure or for research funding but i would have thought a 40 million years record demonstrating both rise and fall of sea level in relation to the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere would trump 100 years and thius be the news.
Must have something to do with brining home the bacon and Murdoch. Another recipe for tart ala media.
Hasn’t the British Met Office just come out with a report saying the last 16 years of world temperatures show slight cooling?
I thought the British Met Office would carry some credibility. I am not denying warming, but I am curious how this contrasting data sits with other data.
Maybe it is a case of greater extremes, or “global weirding”.
Another example of community action from further North:
ACES puts forest health in the spotlight
Its mission: Public awareness, helping shape policy
Janet Urquhart
The Aspen Times
Aspen, CO, Colorado
ASPEN — The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies won’t be getting out of the woods any time soon. Nor does it want to.
Since absorbing the mission of former local nonprofit group For the Forest a year ago, ACES has been busy with more than its hallmark slate of ecology and natural-sciences educational programs for children and adults.
It has taken a lead role in developing the proposed Hunter Creek-Smuggler Mountain Cooperative Plan for habitat, forest-health and recreation improvements on more than 4,000 acres of national forest on the edge of Aspen. It’s also recruiting “citizen scientists” to help monitor local forests and, along with the Aspen Global Change Institute, is working on a Forest Health Index that will give an annual, numerical score to forest health in the Roaring Fork River basin. It will inform an annual State of the Forest report, which will debut this year with the 2012 report.
And ACES has developed a four-minute, animated short film, “What’s Happening in Our Forest?” to raise awareness about forest-health issues among the public and policymakers. The film has been submitted to the New York Animated Short Film Festival, and if Chris Lane, CEO at ACES, has anything to say about it, it will log a million views on YouTube (it hit 700 by Monday morning). Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1vQAWmduM4&;feature=youtu.be to see it.
“On forest issues, we want to be more vocal,” Lane said, launching into forest issues and the link between forest health and climate change with a rapid-fire delivery during an interview in his office last week.
“If we don’t have a healthy forest, we’ll have more carbon, more fire and less water,” he said, rattling off mind-boggling statistics: Drinking water for more than 60 million Americans is derived from forests; the nation’s forests sequester 11 percent of annual U.S. carbon emissions.
Later this year, ACES intends to unveil its Forest Health Index, which will take a bunch of key indicators of forest health and analyze them together to portray the state of the local forest in a way that’s easy to understand.
The index requires tracking a lot of data, including some that has been compiled for years, such as temperature highs and lows and the number of frost-free days annually, plus new information — soil-moisture readings gleaned from sensors placed in Hunter Creek and at Sky Mountain Park outside Snowmass Village, for example. The index also will rely on the observations of members of the public, trained by ACES, who will note when various tree species bud, leaf out and lose their leaves each year. They’ll help track bird migrations, as well.
In all, 19 different sets of data will be incorporated into the index.
“We’ll come up with a numerical value that says the good, the bad and the ugly,” Lane said.
The end goal, he said, is helping forest managers and decision makers to actively manage forest lands outside wilderness areas, much as the Hunter Creek-Smuggler Mountain Cooperative Plan envisions. Developed with the U.S. Forest Service, Aspen and Pitkin County, it proposes more than 800 acres of potential forest-restoration projects that also can improve wildlife habitat and reduce wildfire danger.
Its precursor, spearheaded by For the Forest before it was folded into ACES, was work to slow the advance of pine beetles on city-county open space on Smuggler Mountain. Projects to clear swathes of old-growth oak and dead pines on Smuggler in order to promote new growth have followed.
At ACES’ Rock Bottom Ranch property outside of Basalt, an experiment is under way to regenerate cottonwoods. In the process, big piles of wood chips have been created to fuel a planned biochar pilot project at the ranch.
Biochar is wood that has been pyrolyzed, or burned, in the absence of oxygen. The resulting material sequesters carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere as wood decays, and helps soils retain water and nutrients, according to ACES. It was used to successfully revegetate a barren mine-waste pile outside of Aspen — another For the Forest project.
There are potential uses for biochar in the Hunter Creek-Smuggler plan, and ACES hopes to create a small operation to produce biochar at Rock Bottom Ranch once it acquires or creates a small “pyrolyzer” to do the burning.
“We are bound and determined to make biochar at Rock Bottom Ranch,” said Tom Cardamone, former ACES executive director and now chief ecologist. “I have 300 cubic yards of wood chips waiting to be pyrolyzed.”
Source: http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20130115/NEWS/130119923/1077&ParentProfile=1058
#8. Good work, Frank. We constantly need to be reminded of what the rest of the world is doing in sensible and sustainable forestry. Then people may begin to see right through that stupid and mendacious mantra that Tasmania follows “world’s best practice”.
#8 Another example of empty propaganda filled with semantic dribble which will never eventuate, if it effects the ideological approach of profit growth at any cost.
The history of all ideological approaches, shows nothing will change, except for disaster caused by natural events or the never ending primitive ideological wars against every living thing and the denial of reality, in preference to their primitive infantile beliefs.
What was predicted to accompany global warming/ climate change in 50-100 years has already arrived and we have just entered the second decade of this century. Anyone with just a smidgen of sane logic, can workout what that means in the real world and not the fantasy land existence 99% of humans live within, and rely upon as their guide in life.
Two very recent examples of what the real future holds for ideological humanity is the fires of the sth east, which prove categorically nothing has changed and nothing ever will. Until the useless controlling ideologies are removed things will just go round and round with only disaster at every corner, economically, environmentally and sociologically.
More than 900 wooden power poles were destroyed, the ideological approach is to put in more wooden poles and claim, according the head of Aura’s recovery team, that earthquakes cause more problems with under ground cables than wooden ones. Yet how many earthquakes have caused underground infrastructure damage within Tasmania, in the last 200 years. Gas, telephone, water and sewage all are underground in most cases. In two years time when the next fire goes through, the same crap will be dragged out to satisfy the slaves who lap it up and up will go more wooden poles to feed the profit growth of just a few.
Then there are the houses destroyed, many couldn’t save their houses because their plastic water tanks, piping and guttering melted as the fire arrived, leaving them without water to fight. The majority of houses are built of flimsy highly inflammable materials, and will again be built of the same ridiculous products,with the same results down the track at the next fire.
During this period, many local businesses used their equipment and fuel to help fight the fires, one provided fuel for fire trucks and emergency services, as there was none here. But the entire clean up has been awarded to Hazell brothers and local businesses got nothing. It’s not rocket science to know where the lib/lab/green coalition get their lying money from, or how far they go to feed their elitist backers.
Yesterday I was with someone who lost their home and they were discussing the rebuilding with some bureaucrats, others and insurance assessors. He wants to sit his house into the ground, build out of rock and rammed earth, with an earthen roof because they survive any fire. The amount of ridicule he received was not surprising, nor was the comment by an insurance assessor, that it may not be insurable as it wouldn’t fit the insurance and building material construction formula’s. Everyone else was lining up to get quotes for the same structures and materials as before, no one was trying to introduce anything but the accepted norm of matchbox houses and more disaster ahead.
These facts alone show categorically that nothing will change, nor will the clones change their voting habits, or elect sane logical people who have workable sensible ideas, allowing our island to have a the best chance of survival in the disastrous future ahead. No the clones will all stick to the program and crawl deeper within their denial and refusal to take responsibility for their future. Much safer to leave it in the hands of empty headed liars, deceivers and primitive minded fools, then look to blame someone else. How’s it working for you so far.
Yes Christine, let’s get on with it, show us your support:
Presentation by Morgan Williams, Biochar Solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGf7j8Pa0BY
Published on Jan 1, 2013
Biochar Solutions, The Virgin Earth Challenge, and The Need for Industrywide Collaboration to Reach A Giggaton. Sonoma, California. July 2012.
A brief overview of the Virgin Earth Challenge is provided along with a discussion on how the biochar industry could meaningfully contribute to the sequestration of carbon at a giggaton scale.
Video curtesy of The Sonoma Biochar Initiative.
The problems of climate change, ecosystem devastation and over population have been known and warned about since the 1970’s.
Nothing was done. It’s rather too late now.
So what happens when, for example, food and fresh water crises become critical to survival of entire nations? What if many of these have very large military forces and nuclear weapons?
Unlikely scenario? Well there is a widespread claim that the “Arab spring” was initially triggered by relatively small rises in food prices. And where did that lead?
I unfortunately agree that Paul Gilding’s great disruption is awaiting us all, and not that far away either.
Late to this circle jerk. Heatwaves and other extreme weather events are not attributable to global warming according to Mainstream Climate Science ©
http://www.nature.com/news/extreme-weather-1.11428
Despite MODELS saying otherwise, maybe it’s cherry-picking, or outright something else.
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/majority-of-retractions-are-due-to-misconduct-study-confirms-opaque-notices-distort-the-scientific-record/