Category: Climate

Climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”, according to an Australian Senate report released on Thursday 17 May. It says an existential risk is “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”. These are strong words. (more…)

Peter Dawson reviews Sunburnt Country’ – Dr Joelle Gergis’ new book on Climate Change

Climate Scientist, Dr.Joelle Gergis’s book pulls together from wide-ranging sources the story of the Australian climate since white settlement, but also reaches back 1000 years and more. She seeks to convince us that the climate change challenge we face is, by every measure, real, menacing and urgent. It is both a comprehensive and a compelling answer to the climate sceptics. (more…)

Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past?

In a recent paper, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years. (more…)

The extraction and transfer from the earth crust to the atmosphere of every economically available molecule of carbon, including coal, oil, tar sand oil, shale oil, methane gas, coal seam gas and other forms of hydrocarbon, constitutes the most significant shift in composition of the atmosphere since the PETM hyperthermal event about 56 million years ago and the K-T extinction of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. (more…)

What is widely regarded as the last budget to be delivered by the Turnbull government before the next federal election ceded no ground on climate policy, insisting that it’s much criticised emissions reduction targets would remain unchanged. (more…)

There must be a federal election coming as the government has announced a rescue package for the Great Barrier Reef. Like a damsel (fish) in distress, the Reef has experienced many rescue packages. As early as the mid-1990’s, the federal government introduced the Sugar Coast Environment Rescue Package which aimed to preserve important lowland habitats along the Reef coastline. Governments have been announcing rescue packages ever since. (more…)

Growing up near Midland on the outskirts of Perth during the 1960s and 1970s, I endured the weekly stench from the local abattoir. It was the price we paid to get meat to population centres. My first job was in the local meat processing plant, working with people described as “salt of the earth, working class”, who had historically toiled in appalling conditions because they had no choice.

Pressured by unions over postwar decades, Australian governments eventually stepped in to enforce decent standards for work and wages. Compelled by those who saw the immense cruelty involved, animal welfare laws were also imposed. Meat industry employers objected to red tape and higher labour costs, but community standards were enforced, most operators complied, and the worst operators eventually left the business. (more…)

“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another”

“Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with the performance of fiduciary duty”  Sir Gerard Brennan AC, KBE, QC

After three decades of global inaction, none more so than in Australia, human-induced climate change is now an existential risk to humanity. That is, a risk posing large negative consequences which will be irreversible, resulting inter alia in major reductions in global and national population, species extinction, disruption of economies and social chaos, unless carbon emissions are reduced on an emergency basis. The risk is immediate in that it is being locked in today by our insistence on expanding the use of fossil fuels when the carbon budget to stay below sensible temperature increase limits is already exhausted. (more…)

“Fiduciary: a person to whom power is entrusted for the benefit of another”

“Power is reposed in members of Parliament by the public for exercise in the interests of the public and not primarily for the interests of members or the parties to which they belong. The cry ‘whatever it takes’ is not consistent with the performance of fiduciary duty”  Sir Gerard Brennan AC, KBE, QC

After three decades of global inaction, none more so than in Australia, human-induced climate change is now an existential risk to humanity. That is, a risk posing large negative consequences which will be irreversible, resulting inter alia in major reductions in global and national population, species extinction, disruption of economies and social chaos, unless carbon emissions are reduced on an emergency basis. The risk is immediate in that it is being locked in today by our insistence on expanding the use of fossil fuels when the carbon budget to stay below sensible temperature increase limits is already exhausted.  (more…)

An article by Kerry Brewster in the Guardian this week reports on a significant fraud investigation by Queensland’s Major and Organised Crime Squad (Rural) into subsidies granted to a landholder under the Healthy Headwaters Water Use Efficiency Program. (more…)

The finer policy details of the of the proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) have begun to leak onto newspaper front pages and websites, ahead of Friday’s crucial meeting of federal and state energy ministers.

The good news is that the leaked information suggests solid progress has been made over the past couple of months on both the emissions and reliability components of the policy. (more…)

Australia was once a global leader in marine protection. Today, we have fallen spectacularly from grace. The Commonwealth marine park plans tabled recently in federal Parliament represent a triumph for the oil, gas and fishing industries and a massive backward step for our threatened oceans. (more…)

The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is facing a future crisis that perhaps is not fully recognised by supporters of nature conservation. Visitation is skyrocketing http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/research/NSWparkspopularity.htm which on the face of it is wonderful. More and more people are beginning, potentially at least, to value our national parks and enjoy the experience of visiting them. On the other hand, successive governments have cut funding to NPWS.  Staff numbers and financial resources have dwindled relative to the areas to be managed. The solution on both sides of government seems to be to increase tourism opportunities with the help of commercial interests. https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/john-menadue-the-new-squatters-in-our-national-parks/  That may be a reasonable response, but it shouldn’t come without some serious caveats. Do we really want the Starbucks solution as in USA National Parks? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/yosemites-secretive-starbucks-cafe-opens-in-park-to-delight-and-dismay    (more…)

In 2014 the NSW government hosted the IUCN World Parks Congress. The government touted securing the conference as a victory for their major events calendar. The key outcome of the congress was the Promise of Sydney – the Vision was excellent. The commitments, however, from the NSW Government were almost laughable, given the importance of the Congress on the world stage. http://www.worldparkscongress.org/about/promise_of_sydney_commitments.html The shallowness of the commitments said a lot about what had become of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) which, through the 1990’s, had been described by the IUCN as one of the five best conservation agencies in the world.  (more…)

Solar photovoltaic and wind power are rapidly getting cheaper and more abundant – so much so that they are on track to entirely supplant fossil fuels worldwide within two decades, with the time frame depending mostly on politics. The protestation from some politicians that we need to build new coal stations sounds rather quaint.

The reality is that the rising tide of solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy offers our only realistic chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. (more…)

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save human way of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.” Albert Einstein 1946

Daniel Ellsberg, former presidential advisor, who had released the famous top-secret Pentagon Papers related to the Viet Nam war, also possessed a cache of top secret documents related to America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. In this new  book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” (5/12/2017) he reveals the contents of those documents, with their shocking relevance for today. It is an insider’s account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of the world, whose legacy threatens the very survival of humanity. Ellsberg’s analysis of recent research on nuclear winter shows that even a small nuclear exchange could expand to cause billions of deaths by global nuclear famine. (more…)

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Energy Council meets in the second half of April to consider a report from the Energy Security Board on the proposed initial design of the National Energy Guarantee which seeks to address both emissions reductions and improved reliability in the National Electricity Market. (more…)

In reading some of the panic-stricken media commentary about the impending blackouts we were supposed to have this summer, you might have been led to believe that renewable energy doesn’t contribute much at all to ensuring the lights stayed on. (more…)

A species which has invented combustion, electromagnetic radiation and nuclear energy orders of magnitude more powerful than its own physical potential, needs to be perfectly wise and in control lest it is overwhelmed by these powers. (more…)

A worldwide spate of legal actions against governments and fossil fuel companies is changing the political context of the climate debate more profoundly than anything yet. Yet it may still not be enough to rescue humanity from the other nine existential threats that confront us. Five new groups dedicated to human survival illustrate a new trend towards global consciousness of the peril in which we stand and action to mitigate it. (more…)

It’s an election that is impossible to call. And too important to ignore. (more…)

Eight prominent US Republicans are advocating that the Republican Party should lead action on climate change by introducing a carbon tax, with distribution of the revenue raised to all Americans (a Carbon Dividend). While this may move the debate forward in the USA, the plan is parochial, blind to the range of environmental issues threatening the world, and seeks to maintain current economic and social power structures in the USA and globally. (more…)

Australia has national environment laws – the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act). Yet given the staggering rates of land clearing taking place, resulting in the extinction and endangerment of plants and animals in Australia, these laws are clearly not working.

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