Climate Change

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blowfly started the topic in Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 9:40am

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blowfly Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 9:40am

I couldn't find the old one so......

Anyone following climate change science would have been aware of increasing concern recently. Scientists working on the (IPCC) sixth assessment report (AR6), due next year have expressed concerns about new models which suggest that the potential increase in warming has been under-estimated.

These concerns are based on changes in climate sensitivity. This is the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature increases. Higher sensitivity, which is what the new models are suggesting, means greater temperature rises. The change in the models relates to cloud cover. There has always been uncertainty about the interaction between increasing temperature and clouds.

What the latest models show is cloud cover and water content decreasing as temperatures rise. This creates a feedback loop as decreased cloud cover increases the amount of sunlight reaching the surface which further increases the temperature. The increase in temperature predicted by these models is rapid and catastrophic. The average of the 20 new models shows Australia warming 4.5°C by the end of the century and 2°C by 2040.

The consequences of this amount of warming are impossible to predict with any certainty but would include reduced food production, increased disease, unprecedented heat waves, unprecedented bushfires, large areas becoming uninhabitable, collapsing ecosystems including the loss of virtually all coral…..all before considering the political and social impacts.

So when the report is published next year can we expect to see world leaders hastening to declare a real climate emergency and introduce policies to immediately and massively reduce emissions? Not likely is it?

More here
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085782
Here
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-results-from-the-next-generat...
and here
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/july/1593525600/jo-lle-gergis/w...

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shoredump Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 11:00am

Following BB, and it’s f%@ked! :(
Last weeks 100 degrees Fahrenheit set inside the arctic circle wasn’t lost on me

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blowfly Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 1:25pm

Good to hear shoredump. Too many people are not paying enough attention to realise what a shithole we are being led into.

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Vic Local Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 2:04pm

Covid 19 has given us a great opportunity for a reset. We could spend money of protecting the planet's climate, but Scumo wants big shiny new weapons costing $270 bil. What a complete fucking arsehole.

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garyg1412 Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 2:30pm

VicLocal to put that amount of money into perspective if we used it to build schools, universities, etc and if the average building contract for each project was say $100,000,000 which is a truckload of building, then we could build 2,700 schools, universities, etc. Not that we need that many but makes your eyes water don't it.

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carpetman Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 2:35pm

What a twat.

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Blowin Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 2:41pm

Not much point building all this cool infrastructure if our enemies can just sail in at their leisure and take over.

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blowfly Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 2:49pm

The Fourth Degree

Since our global leadership seems intent on us getting there by 2100, it is worth considering what a world 4°C warmer might actually look like. It is also worth considering that even the models with the worst forecasts still give us a chance of reducing these impacts. The problem then is that we have left it very late and those in power seem content to leave a 4°C warmer world to their undoubtedly wealthy children. After all they will be able to preseve a semblance of normal life in their air conditioned cubicles in the more habitable and less degraded regions of the planet.

So yes this issue in essence boils down to a war of the developed nations against those less developed and, within each nation, of the rich against the poor. Unfortunately there will not be much middle ground so make your choice now. Morality vs survival. Ethics vs your children’s standard of living. Which side are you on? Choose now and avoid the rush as things preogressively turn to shit.

So let’s start with what has already indisputably happened. Since the 1950s the bulk of the extra heat (around 90%) produced by global warnming has been absorbed by the oceans resulting in an average increase in sea levels of 15-20cm. In many regions there has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves as well as increased intensity of extreme rain events and droughts. Globally the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 1998. No surprises there, after all the record matches the earlier predictions quite accurately. So we saw it coming but were too busy adjusting our economic models to further concentrate the wealth to be bothered doing anything about it.

Now the future might be the least certain of landscapes, but somethings are more predictable than others. Climate change after all is a well understood physical process so when ten thousand of the best brains on the planet spend decades staring into their finely tuned precision crystal balls the odds are high that they will get things right, within the stated limits of error, naturally. There will always be minor uncertainties in the models but the only really significant uncertainty comes down to animal behaviour as applied to the most abundant member of the Primate family. Yes those crazy humans, who can tell what they will do next? Start a nuclear war? Carelessly spread some horrible new virus? Keep shitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in ever greater volumes, who’s to know? We can be pretty sure though, that whatever they do in terms of climate change, it will be too little and (is already) too late to avoid significant environmental change.

So a quick trip through 2100. Let’s start with the inundation of global cities just a few examples should give you the general idea. Jakarta (9.5 million), Bangkok (8.2 million), Lagos (17.5 million), Manilla (20 million), Shanghai,(25 million) Dhaka (21 million), London (9 million), Houston (2 million). Moving on we come food. Agricultural yields always decrease during climate extremes. Livestock are equally vulnerable. Floods, heat waves and drought are the main causes, all of which are expected to increase with climate change. Then we have water shortages, increased frequency of the most intense cyclones, irreversible loss of biodiversity including coral reefs (already well under way, eg The Not-So Great Barrier Reef)

In the developed world there will be adjustments and some really unpleasant surprises along the way for just about everyone. (Even worse bushfire seasons than this year’s model are now inevitable.) In the developing world there will be catastrophe upon catastrophe and greatly expanded opportunities for abject human misery. On the upside fat arrogant narcissistic bastards are expected to thrive.

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indo-dreaming Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 7:50pm

Just saw this website, its pretty cool shows each state energy mix live.

Currently night so no solar, but biggest surprise is how much gas we are using.

In WA right now its close to a 50/50 mix of coal and gas.

Decent chunk of gas getting used in QLD right now too.

http://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/

One thing i dont get is it also shows energy demand in grey, currently TAS demand is a little higher than energy produced and SA demand a fair bit over energy produced.

Anyone got ideas on how this works?

So some houses are blacked out?

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blowfly Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 7:50pm

Thanks Indo. Interesting.

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indo-dreaming Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 7:53pm

Wonder what the "other" energy being used currently in QLD & WA is?

Do we have some bio fuels or thermal energy?

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GuySmiley Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 8:01pm

I suspect in FNQ it would be moral indignation from the perennially angry

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I focus Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 8:02pm

Indo the Eastern states trade power hence demand being higher than local supply , they are importing the short fall.

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I focus Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 8:03pm

Other maybe bio mass or diesel

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I focus Wednesday, 1 Jul 2020 at 8:04pm

Scrub diesel (liquid fuel)

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Blowin Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 12:21pm

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for decades and peaked in Britain, Germany and France in the mid-seventies
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid- 19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.
Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. "Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer- winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well- crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
Michael Schellenberger

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Blowin Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 1:17pm

Yeah , I read that second link after reading the letter I’ve posted . Trying to get a bit of background on the fella. I still do t think it completely undermines his claims . I don’t understand how the ad hominem that he’s a nuclear power advocate necessarily eradicated his perspective ?

Surely if he’s who he claims and he’s come to the genuine conclusion that nuclear is the answer then perhaps it behoves us to look into it a little further ourselves ?

I’m no fan of nuclear after seeing the Chernobyl and Fukushima scenarios but really, what would I know ? Maybe the cost / benefit analysis does work in the favour of nuclear ?

He certainly makes several claims which contradict standing theories and which go unchallenged by the IA articles.

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indo-dreaming Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 1:56pm

The whole idea that someone pro nuclear cant be an environmentalist is crazy.*

If we were building nuclear as fast as we are building renewables we would be carbon free much much much quicker.

Wind/solar & Nuclear/Hydro complement each other perfectly, it shouldn't be a choice between either but more a combination of all. (like many country's)

*Yes Nuclear has waste but that waste can be contained, especially in a country like Australia geographically stable.

"Nuclear power is far, far safer than fossil fuels, contrary to public belief"
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

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GuySmiley Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 2:13pm

I guess it’s cold enough here in Vicco today for the old nuclear power is safe chestnut to be brought out and publicly roasted again. Let’s put right next door to the desal plant near Powlett River after all it’s the State’s biggest user of power.

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indo-dreaming Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 2:17pm

Id honestly have no issue with that and im only 18km away.

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GuySmiley Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 3:51pm

... right up to the nano second you realise your property value had dropped by 30-50% you would and then you would be screaming louder than a bus full of school girls.

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troppo dichotomy Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 3:55pm

what in the fukushima could go wrong?chernobyl what i'm saying??

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Blowin Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 4:24pm

Guy.....I honestly don’t know enough about it beyond knowing that you really , really , really don’t want shit to go wrong .

But hey .....this is Australia. We’re an enviable first world nation . We do shit right the first time !

Just look at the impressive way we are worse at quarantine now than we were a century ago.

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GuySmiley Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 4:29pm

Info doesn’t mind being within 18kms from a nuclear power plant but I’m sure he wouldn’t like to be a “Three Mile Island” from one!

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indo-dreaming Saturday, 4 Jul 2020 at 5:02pm

Fair point about property prices...never thought of that aspect.

Chuck it at Portland, prices there cant go any lower with the increase in jobs it could even raise property prices.

Unless there is some big break through in tech in relation to cost it's never going to happen anyway.

But it is pretty crazy in Australia the whole paranoia and disinformation around Nuclear , when ever it is talked about people never fail to mention chernobyl and fukushima both power plants that started getting built exactly 50 years ago, so tech min 50 years old possibly older.

Imagine if you were to have conversation about anything else be it cars, computers, surfboards etc and you based you argument on 50 year old tech.

Yeah computers are shit i dont need one for starters i dont have a room big enough to fit one in.

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mowgli Wednesday, 23 Sep 2020 at 5:26pm

Regarding the site, Watts Up With That...

The purpose of that site, is not to provide all the facts/objective facts, etc etc. It was set up specifically to muddy the waters in the public's mind regarding climate science. I don't know how else to put it. Just dwell on that statement (the former, not the latter). The site was established first and foremost to misinform. The track record of the kind of articles, posts, etc on there and how often these are shown to be incorrect and deliberately misleading.

I'll be honest, to say they lie a lot would itself be a lie. Because their most common tactic is to cherry pick things, whether that's taking a bit of data (e.g. a handful of location outlier from a dataset of thousands) or put up a statement from a single physicist (that contradicts what 500 other physicists have agreed upon), or take things out of context (again, a datapoint or a statement someone has made), or continue to push questions (e.g. role of volcanoes) that were legitimate questions to the science....back in the 1980s....but have long been shown to be negligible causes, or talk about research supposedly shows there's nothing to worry about - research that has since been discredited because it's riddled with flaws or shonky methods. In my view, they're very careful to avoid making statements that are 100% lies. What they do is present things in a way that makes it almost certain that a reader would conclude something - that is, that the rest of the climate science world is wrong, etc etc. I hope the distinction I am making is clear.

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mowgli Wednesday, 23 Sep 2020 at 1:15pm

littering and..

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mowgli Wednesday, 23 Sep 2020 at 1:15pm

littering and...

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indo-dreaming Sunday, 12 Jul 2020 at 3:07pm

Just for arguments sake

I dont think its that simple, firstly solar cant work alone it needs another backup energy source, or storage for about 12hrs of 24hrs sometimes more.

So you need to calculate minerals to make solar panels and their life span and also need to calculate everything for batteries (yeah pumped hydro can work in certain situations too) or you need to also factor in the back up energy source (say gas etc)

Anyway this is a good non bias video on Nuclear economics.

Anyway it's never going to happen in Australia, i don't even bother trying to push the idea.

But that said i think it's very important to acknowledge that not building nuclear in Australia in the past was a major fuck up and is a big reason why we are so reliant on coal, its also important to acknowledge that the same people that complain about our reliance on coal are the same people that opposed nuclear.

Imagine if we had say 30% of our energy produced from Nuclear that we had built in the 70s or 80s even if long term we planned to close them down, we would still currently be way ahead in carbon free energy and have a much easier transition to 100% renewables.

Anyway i wouldn't completely write the future of Nuclear off Nuclear Fusion (not Fission) kind of is a long shot but it still could one day happen, it would be the perfect energy source if it every does.

Again this is a good non bias video on it and its development

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mowgli Wednesday, 23 Sep 2020 at 1:15pm

littering and...

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truebluebasher Wednesday, 22 Jul 2020 at 8:32pm

Comes as no surprise that Australia is the 1st nation to be sued by bond investors.
Australia has failed to disclose how climate change impacts on Government Bonds.

23 year old Vic' Katta O'Donnell says Govt must stop keeping us in the dark.
Notes: Lack of transparency in lending Govt her money to protect her future
We allege that the Govt is misleading & deceiving investors by not telling them about the risks.(Notes Bush Fires)
There is no disclosure to investors about the risks Climate change poses to bonds & to society as a whole.

Case does not seek damages but declaration of official breach by officials.
Also an injunction forcing Govt to cease promoting bonds without said disclosure.

tbb feels it's better the crew takes up the evolving case from here...
This is a first & one off so requires legal wigs & volumes of precedent
.
Check ABC TV news teaser...here's the print version.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/student-sues-australian-governmen...

Episode 1: "Bond [ *KATTA* ] Bond" ('Go Girl Power!')
https://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/tvbanners/9114440/p9114440_b_v8_aa.jpg

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GuySmiley Wednesday, 22 Jul 2020 at 9:50pm

TTB, saw this tonight. Nice approach I thought. The RBA and ASIC have already issued warnings to business on such matters. Plus superannuation funds have also started divesting out of fossil fuels given the very clear fiduciary legal requirements dictating they must always act in the fund members best interests.

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blowfly Thursday, 23 Jul 2020 at 11:31am

“Under our current emissions trajectories, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will likely double between 2060 and 2080, relative to concentrations before the industrial revolution. Before that, they had changed little for millennia.”

“A major new assessment has now calculated a range of 2.6–3.9℃. This implies that alarmingly high estimates from some recent climate models are unlikely, but also that comfortingly low estimates from other studies are even less likely.”

https://theconversation.com/the-climate-wont-warm-as-much-as-we-feared-b...

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mowgli Wednesday, 23 Sep 2020 at 1:14pm

Indeed

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blowfly Wednesday, 19 Aug 2020 at 4:18pm

Just what we need. More bad news

Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return
Even if the climate cools, study finds, glaciers will continue to shrink

Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.
The finding, published today, Aug. 13, in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland's glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers.
"We've been looking at these remote sensing observations to study how ice discharge and accumulation have varied," said Michalea King, lead author of the study and a researcher at The Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. "And what we've found is that the ice that's discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that's accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet."
King and other researchers analyzed monthly satellite data from more than 200 large glaciers draining into the ocean around Greenland. Their observations show how much ice breaks off into icebergs or melts from the glaciers into the ocean. They also show the amount of snowfall each year -- the way these glaciers get replenished.
The researchers found that, throughout the 1980s and 90s, snow gained through accumulation and ice melted or calved from glaciers were mostly in balance, keeping the ice sheet intact. Through those decades, the researchers found, the ice sheets generally lost about 450 gigatons (about 450 billion tons) of ice each year from flowing outlet glaciers, which was replaced with snowfall.
"We are measuring the pulse of the ice sheet -- how much ice glaciers drain at the edges of the ice sheet -- which increases in the summer. And what we see is that it was relatively steady until a big increase in ice discharging to the ocean during a short five- to six-year period," King said.
The researchers' analysis found that the baseline of that pulse -- the amount of ice being lost each year -- started increasing steadily around 2000, so that the glaciers were losing about 500 gigatons each year. Snowfall did not increase at the same time, and over the last decade, the rate of ice loss from glaciers has stayed about the same -- meaning the ice sheet has been losing ice more rapidly than it's being replenished.
"Glaciers have been sensitive to seasonal melt for as long as we've been able to observe it, with spikes in ice discharge in the summer," she said. "But starting in 2000, you start superimposing that seasonal melt on a higher baseline -- so you're going to get even more losses."
Before 2000, the ice sheet would have about the same chance to gain or lose mass each year. In the current climate, the ice sheet will gain mass in only one out of every 100 years.
King said that large glaciers across Greenland have retreated about 3 kilometers on average since 1985 -- "that's a lot of distance," she said. The glaciers have shrunk back enough that many of them are sitting in deeper water, meaning more ice is in contact with water. Warm ocean water melts glacier ice, and also makes it difficult for the glaciers to grow back to their previous positions.
That means that even if humans were somehow miraculously able to stop climate change in its tracks, ice lost from glaciers draining ice to the ocean would likely still exceed ice gained from snow accumulation, and the ice sheet would continue to shrink for some time.
"Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss," said Ian Howat, a co-author on the paper, professor of earth sciences and distinguished university scholar at Ohio State. "Even if the climate were to stay the same or even get a little colder, the ice sheet would still be losing mass."
Shrinking glaciers in Greenland are a problem for the entire planet. The ice that melts or breaks off from Greenland's ice sheets ends up in the Atlantic Ocean -- and, eventually, all of the world's oceans. Ice from Greenland is a leading contributor to sea level rise -- last year, enough ice melted or broke off from the Greenland ice sheet to cause the oceans to rise by 2.2 millimeters in just two months.
The new findings are bleak, but King said there are silver linings.
"It's always a positive thing to learn more about glacier environments, because we can only improve our predictions for how rapidly things will change in the future," she said. "And that can only help us with adaptation and mitigation strategies. The more we know, the better we can prepare."
This work was supported by grants from NASA. Other Ohio State researchers who worked on this study are Salvatore Candela, Myoung Noh and Adelaide Negrete.
https://news.osu.edu/warming-greenland-ice-sheet-passes-point-of-no-return/

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blowfly Thursday, 10 Sep 2020 at 11:38am

.

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blowfly Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 8:45am

Scotty and Angoose reveal their latest plan to funnel tax payers cash to their mates while pretending to reduce emissions.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2020/09/17/...

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Craig Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 9:30am

Jeez, it's such a fucked state of affairs, all summed up in that article. Thanks blowfly.

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blowfly Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 9:46am

Yeh hard to pick the driving cause between pure stupidity, ideology and corruption. Probably some devil's brew of the three. Have you noticed the changes in Morrison? He looks like a man in the middle of an anxiety attack desperate to hide his true state of mind. All pursed lips and clenched teeth. You could even feel sorry for the bastard if he wasn't well....such a bastard.
Toad

GuySmiley's picture
GuySmiley's picture
GuySmiley Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 9:57am

I find it very difficult to think about such decisions in a calm rational way, its mostly anger and sad resignation that the science is again being ignored. On any and all grounds this approach doesn't make sense unless considered in terms of " .. pure stupidity, ideology and corruption .." I'll add there is also the unwavering righteousness that the far religious right have in the infallibility of their beliefs and values. Very sad.

blowfly's picture
blowfly's picture
blowfly Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 10:10am

"I'll add there is also the unwavering righteousness that the far religious right have in the infallibility of their beliefs and values. Very sad."

This is pre-Enlightenment thinking. It raises ideology over reality. The US has been exporting this style of thought for several decades now and it has been taken up with enthusiasm by authoritarians everywhere. If the trend continues climate change might be just the start of the problems facing the world.

H2O's picture
H2O's picture
H2O Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 10:49am

Mike Cannon Brooks, on the ridiculous gas plan.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/tech-billionaire...

Some may say hes pushing his own project with Musk but from my reading of current energy technology he is on the money.

blowfly's picture
blowfly's picture
blowfly Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 11:13am

Yeh I saw him on the news last night talking sense....which will never fly with the idiot collective currently in power.

factotum's picture
factotum's picture
factotum Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 11:31am

Read this and then compare the forthcoming 'commentary' on here from the usual suspects (if it indeed arrives).

https://www.michaelwest.com.au/gas-gush-the-toadies-of-mainstream-media-...

Australia! You're standing in it!

GuySmiley's picture
GuySmiley's picture
GuySmiley Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 2:20pm

Recently here there has been discussion about how both main parties are just the same same well on issues like this one the is a large difference and its why I still vote ALP, possibly the only few reasons I do.

blowfly's picture
blowfly's picture
blowfly Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 2:29pm

You have to vote for the better option Guy. I definitey do not agree with all ALP policies......but as long as they remain the only viable alternative government and continue to represent an improvement over the COALition I will support them. It's a pretty low bar but that's the state of the nation.

Vic Local's picture
Vic Local's picture
Vic Local Friday, 18 Sep 2020 at 3:30pm

blowfly,
I hope you are wise enough to use preferences to send a message to the ALP, while still ensuring they get your vote.
By voting Green or an environmentally-focused independent 1, and preferencing the ALP above the LNP, Labor then have to fear upsetting voters concerned about CC at the next election. Until that happens, the ALP will cave into the fossil fuel industry and the useful idiots who think coal jobs have a long term future.