Category: Climate

The 2019 OECD Environmental Performance Review for Australia, launched recently and reported in The Guardian if hardly anywhere else, makes horrible reading. “Australia is home to a 10^th of global species and is seen by many as synonymous with pristine coastal areas and an outback brimming with nature. However the country is increasingly exposed to rising sea levels, floods, heat waves, bushfires and drought”…  wildlife is in a poor state and its condition is worsening… Australia’s Strategy for Nature 2018-2030 appears “unlikely to catalyse progress”. With the exception of the Reef 2050 Plan funding for conservation and research is falling.  “Australia has no national long term vision on sustainable development…is one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the OECD, has no long term strategy for lowering emissions…and emissions are projected to increase by 2030.”  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/30/australias-record-on-emissions-and-sustainability-condemned-by-oecd-review (more…)

Despite Donald Trump, Scott Morrison and others there is a significant change of opinion on climate change around much of the western world – particularly in the US of all places – for the better.  (more…)

Why are governments around the world  avoiding the constellation of threats to survival of humans on the planet? 
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The Australian government’s most recent projections indicate that greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 5.4% between now and 2030, when they will be only 7% below the level in 2005. Such a reduction is well below Australia’s Paris Agreement commitment to reduce emissions by 26-28% between 2005 and 2030. And yet the Prime Minister continues to insist that Australia will achieve its commitment ‘in a canter’. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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In response to an excellent article by Michelle Pini “Something stinks in the Coalition and its not dead fish” Pearls and irritations 18/01, I posted a comment. “Yes a Royal Commission with forensic capacity to peel away each layer of vested interest. Politician, scientist and industry”. Sounds a bit rough on scientists but let me explain…….. (more…)

Environmental issues, particularly but not only climate change, are once again prominent in the public eye and their importance has been reflected in frequent posts over the years in Pearls & Irritations. We can also be certain that a range of environmental issues will feature strongly in the forthcoming Federal election, particularly for instance climate change and carbon dioxide emission reduction targets, energy policy, the proposed Adani mine, fracking, the Murray Darling River, the Great Barrier Reef and land clearing. Some issues will assume greater importance in some electorates than others.

Starting this week, Peter Sainsbury will be compiling a list for your weekend reading of five or so recent articles that highlight significant aspects of the threats posed to the environment and what is being done to tackle them. The intention is to cover a wide range of issues from all over the world, and to try to include articles from regions that are close to us but that we don’t hear so much about in Australia, for instance Asia and the Pacific. This is an experiment so feedback and suggestions for interesting articles for future compilations are welcome.  John Menadue

Disappointed by the slowness of national governments and inter-governmental organisations to tackle climate change? Michael Northrop from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund highlights commitments by states, cities and companies at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September 2018 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in buildings, transportation, ports, renewable electricity, waste, land use and oceans and through finance.

Climate change isn’t the only environmental problem. Humans are changing the environment and ‘earth systems’ in many other ways, creating a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This article, from AsiaGlobal Online, discusses how climate change and the Anthropocene are related but not synonymous.

A frank assessment by Giles Parkinson of where the Federal Government’s energy and climate policies stood at the end of 2018 and what the state and territory governments think about it all.

A picture may well be worth a thousand words but when it comes to promoting awareness of and action to combat climate change make sure those pictures include ordinary people suffering the consequences or taking action. Viewers are much more engaged by pictures that tell a human story that engages their emotions than ones that may be artistically striking and praiseworthy but devoid of human content.

Talking of pictures, Jack Waterford discusses the causes and political implications of some pretty dramatic ones of dead fish from the Murray River and Menindee Lakes this week (most photos did include some local people!). As he says, ‘The fish don’t need a detailed inquest: just by themselves, they show that something has gone very badly wrong.’ Few parties emerge from Mr Waterford’s scathing analysis with any credit.

And finally there is a graph from the Bureau of Meteorology that very clearly shows how Australia has been getting hotter. The graph shows Australia’s mean temperature anomaly for each year from 1901-2018. The annual temperature anomaly is the difference between the average temperature for that year and the average for the years 1961-1990. Yes, there were warmer than average years in the first half of the 20^th century but it’s clear that before 1957 the vast majority of years were considerably colder than the 1961-1990 average, whereas after 1978 they were mostly warmer than the average, and increasingly so. Statistically the warming has been 0.13 degrees C per decade from 1910-2018. The media loves headlines and pictures about record temperatures across the country but seldom makes as prominent the links to the underlying global warming.

The plight of the Darling River shocked the nation last week, when up to a million fish were killed by lack of oxygen, accompanying the disruption of a blue-green algal bloom on a forty kilometre stretch of the river near Menindee, southeast of Broken Hill. This followed a similar kill of tens of thousands of native fish in December.

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The (Northern) summer of 2018 was intense: deadly wildfires, persistent drought, killer floods and record-breaking heat. Although scientists exercise great care before linking individual weather events to climate change, the rise in global temperatures caused by human activities has been found to increase the severity, likelihood and duration of such conditions.  (more…)

“Earth is now substantially out of energy balance. The amount of solar energy that Earth absorbs exceeds the energy radiated back to space. The principal manifestations of this energy imbalance are continued global warming on decadal time scales and continued increase in ocean heat content” (James Hansen 2018).

“The people have no voice since they have no information” …“No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent” (Gore Vidal)

With the exception of the few who comprehend the nature of a Faustian Bargain, some billionaires, captains of industry and their political and media mouthpieces are driving humanity toward self-destruction through the two biggest enterprises on Earth, the fossil fuel industry, which is devastating the Earth atmosphere, and the industrial-military machine leading toward nuclear war. The rest of the world is dragged subconsciously, induced by bread and circuses. (more…)

Climate change is worsening the drought now affecting huge swathes of the continent, bringing gut-wrenching misery for farmers and the communities they support. And what have some of the parliamentary representatives of those regions been up to? They have been trying to convince the Japanese to invest in more coal-fired power generation in Australia.  (more…)

The federal Coalition government has achieved what most would have assumed impossible at the start of 2018: its position on climate and energy policies has worsened and shifted even further to the right.  (more…)

“Dear Caesar 
Keep Burning, raping, killing 
But please, please 
Spare us your obscene poetry 
And ugly music ” 

(From Seneca’s last letter to Nero) 
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It takes only a spark, from a lightning or human ignition, to start a fire, but it involves high temperatures, a period of drought, a build-up of dry vegetation and strong winds to start a bush fire, such as is devastating Queensland and recently California. When all these factors combine firestorms ensue, enhanced by strong winds from the hot interior of the continent, overwhelming the desiccated bush and human habitats. This is the face of global warming, which on the continents has reached an average of 1.5oC (http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/) 
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In so far as it may have been assumed that the growing manifestations of global warming through extreme weather events will cause people to realize the reality and the implications of carbon emissions, this is only partly happening, due to ongoing attempts by large part of the mainstream media to attribute these events to natural causes., masking the existential threat posed by global climate disruption. (more…)

In Australia, little attention has been given to the concept of “energy diplomacy”, including the way in which it might interact with foreign policy objectives. (more…)

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The federal government’s non-response to climate change has run its course and events are rapidly overtaking its startled members. And now, after years of resistance, Woodside, BHP and Rio Tinto have done an about face and are calling for a price on carbon.  (more…)