A question about climate change/global warming.

i'm sure entire land masses going on fire is just a normal function of periodic climate change. maybe sunspots or something.

according to my father in law this is just a normal cycle

we should have a sweep on what percentage of the world has to be fucked before climate change deniers admit the vague possibility that this isn't "normal"

in geologic time lots of major cities being under 100 ft water was just "a normal part of the cycle", but hey let's not be in too much of rush to get there!

Australia is seven minutes from starting the second month of summer. Totally normal cycle for beachside towns to be wiped out after five months of fires, at this stage every year.

seemed a bit gauche of Auckland to set all them fireworks off tbh

Don’t worry the SYDNEY fuck you to the dead and fieries is kicking off right now. (And melbourne which I can actually hear)

I stopped posting about the Prime Minister because it was making me even sicker trying to re-read & condense his daily cuntery, but he was sighted this morning literally rearrranging deck furniture on the patio of his taxpayer-funded mansion, to enhance the view for his donors & friends of the Sydney Harbour fireworks.

xpost

deckchairs on the titanic morelike

I stopped posting about the Prime Minister because it was making me even sicker trying to re-read & condense his daily cuntery, but he was sighted this morning literally rearrranging deck furniture on the patio of his taxpayer-funded mansion, to enhance the view for his donors & friends of the Sydney Harbour fireworks.

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Tuesday, 31 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

So...he will probably be re-elected then?

❗Breaking News❗

A new provisional maximum temperature of 18.7 °C was recorded at Achfary in Scotland on the 28th December 2019

It will be quality controlled & if validated would be the highest temperature officially recorded in the UK during December pic.twitter.com/FXVMXvcR5I

— Met Office (@metoffice) December 31, 2019

hell yeah it’s the scottish riviera

So...he will probably be re-elected then?

He was only "elected" (Australia doesn't vote for PMs) in May (after ascending in an inter-party coup last year, by leapfrogging the conspirators while they were knifing each other), so doesn't have to run again for another two and a half years.

My local member became national leader of the opposition after the election, and decided the way to win next time is rather than marketing moderate centrist or, heaven forfend, progressive policies, to spend three years attacking the right-wing coalition for not being right wing enough. So they're out there complaining that the government should be putting more brown people in concentration camps, to get better value for money on the actual billions being spent on running them. As recently as two days ago, he agreed that "now is not the time" to discuss beginning to think about possible plans for transitioning away from coal at some point, because the country is on fire and that's what's important.

The Greens (who are a party of broad, very very mildly progressive policies, not a single-issue environmental lobby) have been growing in electoral popularity for 20 years, but are absolutely marginalised by the destruction of non-Murdoch, non-Facebook media under the last few LNP governments, so have massive difficulty getting their policies in front of voters.


An LNP government managed to pass gun control legislation, against the wishes of their base, in a matter of months after the country's only mass shooting by an individual ever. (Legislation that had been languishing for 12 years, at that point.) A PM who doesn't actively shill for the coal lobby in Parliament, and isn't waiting to be Raptured, could absolutely have responded to the fires two months ago by announcing the need to create tens of thousands of jobs in the renewables sector, appeared on TV every day at the site of a new fire and pushed this message, and passed bold & sweeping legislation when parliament reconvenes in February.

Farmers are the rusted-on N voters that get the L politicians into government via coalition, and all they need is to be told that climate change is real (which they have already seen with their own eyes) and something can be done about it: the ideological opposition would stop existing if that ideology was no longer handed down. Without an opposition party though, and no personal belief in the future of the planet, Morrison has literally no incentive to change anything between now and the election. Right-wing governments usually trash the economy, and take over once a centrist government has patched some of it back up: the budget is in surplus, so Morrison's policy is simply not to spend money on anything, such that they can campaign on being the only govt to ever carry a surplus through to next election, or w/e.

Do we need to Mention our useless prick of a prime minster used the party he is hosting today (as opposed to the one last night) to deflect questions on the underlying causes of the bushfires and to encourage us all to be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers.

9 people confirmed dead today with more missing.

It’s probably for the other thread but surely the LNP will knife ScoMo in the back.

I’m guessing too much of a useful idiot.

Did I say useless prick? I should have said evil Christian millenarian sociopath.

Apparently he has deleted every Facebook reply on his “we can ignore the fires now, the cricket’s starting” press release that isn’t made by a fellow Pentecostal xtian, though I can’t check that obv

remember when the party spent 20 years trying to marginalise Tony Abbott because he was a religious nutcase, then got exhausted and accidentally made him PM, then had to knife him when it turned out he was too completely cooked in the head to function in a managerial role, let alone lead a country? I guess it was a long time ago, no lessons to be learnt from ancient history

*checks watch * ah yes, September 2015, or The Before Times

Different kind of Christian though, Abbott’s lot had incense and serial pedophiles in leadership roles. Maybe they though it could work without the incense.

Morrison’s personal mentor covered up the founder of their church’s serial child molestation in two countries, but there’s only room for one leadership role in a prosperity gospel. So once he’d taken charge of the church himself, Houston let the cops take his dad.

(For sure Morrison’s religioniness sailed under the radar, especially when the party is nominally made up of Christians themselves, by being less ostentatious. Recruiting for your teenage gay conversion camps and pregnancy jails through a multinational chain of popular coffee shops, and running the most jaw-droppingly obvious chart-rigging operation in music history, stands out less than robes and incense.)

My family's farm barely escaped fires in Conjula a few hours outside Sydney a few days ago. They saved the animals, but some structures got burned down or melted. The pictures were extraordinary. The fire passed right through but missed the main stuff, like the house. Very lucky.

Conjola

please pass on that a bunch of strangers on the internet are angry, and sad, and relieved for them, Josh

nobody ever predicted this, nothing could have been done

pic.twitter.com/s4kcdQTSyA

— Greg Jericho (@GrogsGamut) January 1, 2020

That reads better if you imagine it was written by Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road.

The incense is key.
https://www.stspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Censer1.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/FqdUVRo.jpg

Missing shot from that awful Kylie video.

Thanks for the thorough ans to my qn earlier sic:

"The Greens (who are a party of broad, very very mildly progressive policies, not a single-issue environmental lobby) have been growing in electoral popularity for 20 years, but are absolutely marginalised by the destruction of non-Murdoch, non-Facebook media under the last few LNP governments, so have massive difficulty getting their policies in front of voters"

Don't these photos and videos and deaths initiate any kind of conversation? You can say a lot about the media here but I reckon we'd have that if this was going on.

To be honest I don’t know I live so far inside the lentil curtain that I don’t know what goes on in the liberal voting suburbs or the nats and shooters voting countryside.

I’m hoping it does change things, in the minds of most people it has to transition it has to transition from an abstract issue to a matter of self-interest in the minds of enough people. People comprehensively voted ‘I’m all right jack and fuck the rest of youse’ in the last election. Maybe this changes the I’m alright part of the equation for enough people.

Scott Morrison has started the new year with a message urging Australians to celebrate living “in the most amazing country on earth” and remember “there’s no better place to raise kids anywhere on the planet”.

https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/11834474-1x1-large.jpg

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/15030/large/1-under-the-dock.jpg (<- 2013)

“Whether they’re started by lightning storms or whatever the cause may be, our firefighters and all of those who have come behind them to support them, whether they’re volunteering in the front line or behind the scenes in a great volunteer effort, it is something that will happen against the backdrop of this Test match.

“But at the same time, Australians will be gathering, whether it’s at the SCG [Sydney cricket ground] or around television sets all around the country, and they’ll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides of the Tasman and I think they’ll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians and the way that people have gone about remembering the terrible things that other Australians are dealing with at the moment.”

The capacity of the Sydney Cricket Ground is 0.18933500379399737% of the Australian population.

For two days in a row, Canberra - the seat of federal government - has had the worst-rated air quality in the world. (Although Scott lives in a mansion in Sydney, not in the Prime Minister's residence in Canberra, and the government is in the middle of a two month holiday.)

Today, after Scott hosted the New Zealand and Australian cricket teams for a party at his house where "the lawn underfoot crunched like tinder," smoke from the Australian bushfires covered the entirety of New Zealand.

For Americans, this is like a fire in Cuba covering New York state in smoke. For UK folk, it's like a fire in Sicily covering Ireland in smoke. (The area on fire or burnt in total is now about the size of the UK.)

Last year, Scott Morrison paid an "empathy consultant" $190,000 to advise him on how to speak to farmers affected by drought.

Don't these photos and videos and deaths initiate any kind of conversation? You can say a lot about the media here but I reckon we'd have that if this was going on.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I refer the honourable member to my previous answers

"Bigger factors are Murdoch's domination of all media being finally entrenched by Facebook (the last two remaining broadsheets in the country sold themselves to a commercial TV company last year)"

"no doubt that the BBC has been weakened and the news operations stacked with tories, but the LNP governments have gutted funding for the Australian equivalent, the ABC, over the last 18 years, and followed their re-election in May by having feds raid journalists' homes and enter the ABC headquarters with a warrant allowing them to access or delete any content on servers, from workers' emails arranging lunch, to the entire library of broadcast programmes and news rushes."

The Guardian is doing the best mix of reporting and op-ed that I've seen from the other side of the world, tbfttl


Morrison won't even go on the ABC, but he calls in to the right-wing talk radio station in Sydney whose figurehead broadcaster

- instigated the Cronulla race riots in 2005
- gets scolded every few years for using the phrase "nigger in the woodpile" on air
- in 2012 said that women should not be allowed to vote or run for office because they're "destroying the joint"
- followed up his calls that year for the first female Prime Minister to be drowned at sea in a chaff bag by:
- auctioning off a chaff bag at a tory student organisation and declaring that the PM's recently-deceased father had died of shame
- has been the subject of 20-30 defamation cases
- ...and several contempt of court cases

- this year responded to the first female Prime Minister of New Zealand making comments on climate change in the Pacific by saying Scott Morrison should murder her by "shov[ing] a sock down her throat"

The ex-fire chief who has been asking Morrison to meet with a group of 23 emergency services experts since April, to warn of the conditions they were projecting for summer, on video two months ago:

Greg Mullins is a former NSW fire chief who has just visited firefighters battling blazes in northern California. He has a stark #bushfire warning for Scott Morrison and his government. #abc730 @zdaniel #auspol pic.twitter.com/DLhPd3eXHr

— abc730 (@abc730) November 6, 2019

Jesus fucking christ, what a mess.

Anyone looking to donate could do worse than give to these guys.

https://www.rapidreliefteam.org/

I met some of them last year and among other things they turn out to make bacon sandwiches and coffee for fieries and evacuees. They are also helping people who have lost their homes.

Will do, thanks for the tip Ed.
A good friend of mine used to be a c@lfire battalion chief and recently left his job to take on a new role providing support for firefighters dealing with ptsd and addiction. He says some of the toughest people he worked with are having breakdowns and many more are questioning how many more seasons they can take. They need all the support they can get.

I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue

In 2017, MP Craig Kelly was the chair of the Coalition government's Climate Committee. In that capacity, he went on ABC radio to say that renewable energy would lead to deaths in up to a quarter of Australian households, due to higher bills meaning people were afraid to turn their heating on.

(Rates had increased that year due to gas prices going up.)


In September 2019, he spoke at a Monarchists League function and said that climate change means the nation of Tuvalu is "floating, not sinking," because "a coral atoll actually floats on the ocean."

The next week, he prepared charts proving that climate change is a "lie" and a "fraud," in order to wave them on a live televised weekly political panel discussion show. Due to "concern about the government's climate change position, [with MPs privately] arguing it was a weakness in the election campaign despite Mr Morrison's surprise win," Morrison barred him from appearing on broadcast TV*.

In response, he addressed Parliament to insist that "no link between climate change and drought" exists, and despite his argument about the floating country a week earlier, now said that old photographs of a fort in Sydney Harbour would prove that sea levels have not risen.


* He continued to appear on late-night right-wing pay-TV talk shows - all pay TV in Australia is a Murdoch enterprise - multiple times a week.

In December, while Australia's delegates were teaming up with Brazil to torpedo the international climate policy meeting in Madrid, Kelly addressed the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association and urged them "words to the effect of ‘make sure you burn as much oil and gas as you can over summer, put your roast in a gas fired oven, fill up your gas bottles, and fly from one end of the country to the other.’"

Firefighters leave a note on the windshield of a car, apologising for not being able to save the driver's house, just the car and his boat.

https://10daily.com.au/ip/s3/2020/01/02/62f43421c67de02fc12f3417404dbd59-814377.jpg

An essay by the former Labor Treasurer, from the government which established a trading scheme that drastically cut carbon emissions from 2011-2013, on the Murdoch campaign of lies - since boasted about by LNP PM Tony Abbott's chief advisor and factotum - that crashed the country back to a coal-fired death spiral:

https://www.alp.org.au/wayne-swan-archive/articles/article-our-lost-decade-on-climate-change-energy-policy/

Over a hundred fires are still burning in NSW. 900 homes have been lost in the state.

Over forty fires have now started in the state of Victoria.

17 people have died, nine in the last week.

Ecologists from the University of Sydney are estimating 500,000,000 animals have been burnt alive or died from smoke and heat.


Navy ships and army aircraft have finally been called in to help evacuate people from beaches and fight fires in the last couple of days.

Twenty years ago, Admiral Chris Barrie, while head of the Australian Defence Force - ie the entire army, navy, air force and other military agencies - advised LNP PM John Howard that climate change was a developing national security issue that needed to be prepared for. (In retirement he has continued to press this, including the incidence of post traumatic stress conditions for fire & emergency responders, workers & volunteers, and long-term impacts on regular folks who are affected.) Howard's 1996 election had tanked alreadyy-kneecapped plans (established from 1989 onward) to cut greenhouse emissions by 20%, and in retirement he has promoted books for school children arguing that "theories" of human impact on global warming are a scam.

was reminded how campaigners, scientists and popular fiction in Australia have been predicting these outcomes for forty solid years

Free ebook in PDF, epub, mobi and HTML (or $44 print, as it's a university publication): Global Warming and Climate Change - What Australia knew and buried...then framed a new reality for the public

newest galaxy brain shit from the Facebook chuds over here is that the fires were started by green activists to further their global warming agenda

I’m sure the Murdoch press and Sky fkn News will be all over this shortly

the human race, what a fuckin dead loss, I guess we got what we deserved

A few decades ago, teenager Shane Fitzsimmons saw his father die in a fire hazard reduction exercise gone wrong in Sydney's Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park. He grew up to become the Commissioner of the Rural Fire Service in NSW, the 74,000 member volunteer organisation that provides emergency services to the 95% of the state that isn't, essentially, the city of Sydney.

Here he is this morning, giving posthumous awards for Bravery and Service to the son of volunteer Geoffrey Keaton, who died fighting fires a week before Christmas.

https://i.imgur.com/b8aMBcm.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/015nEUL.jpg

Current PM Scott Morrison held a press conference today, which he opened by saying it had been "tremendous" to attend Keaton's funeral. He has not published his remarks - though he did upload a transcript of his speech about everyone sitting down and watching cricket, for some reason fore-dated to two days in the future - but video shows him arguing that it was generous of him to attend a presser when fires aren't a predictable event, and are a matter for state governments, so doubly nothing to do with him. To people in areas affected by fire, he informed them that it is against the Australian character to complain, and fires aren't his fault anyway, and that people (reminder: there are towns with ppl literally standing on beaches in their thousands waiting for the buildings to stop being on fire) should "be patient" because the states' emergency services will get around to them in due time. With the most new fires this week starting in Victoria, a state with a Labor government, Morrison repeatedly pressed that any suffering was the fault of Premier Daniel Andrews, not him, Premier Daniel Andrews.

That $190,000 empathy consultant has paid off, though: he spent several minutes talking about the troubles that tourists have had sitting in traffic leaving the New South Wales South Coast, a region that largely survives all year on summer trade, and has been issued with tourist evacuation orders. Further empathy came when he discussed the NSW town of Cobargo, where two people died over New Year's. Scott explained to the nation that a tragedy occurred in this town, to wit: they have lost all electricity supply, and so dairy farmers have had to "pour the milk down the hill."

Asked whether his response to the crisis was adequate, the Prime Minister said now was a time to remain calm.

"That's the only thing that has my focus and attention."


When citing the current head of the ADF, Morrison accidentally referred to "Admiral Houston... erm, Campbell." Brian Houston is, as noted, Morrison's pastor and "personal mentor."

He also said that climate change is a global problem so Australia can't do anything about it, but he's going to hold meetings with state Premiers "after the fires," talked over a female reporter, and just fucked off when re-asked questions he had ducked previously.

Extraordinary footage. The PM flees a photo op after being confronted by angry locals. So much for the “only Twitter hates Morrison” narrative https://t.co/xeuiVxIfRq

— Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) January 2, 2020

Here's Scott forgetting that a pentecostal multimillionaire scammer, paedophile protector and child torturer isn't the only person allowed to advise him, and here he is getting abused by residents in the only fire-affected town he has visited.

(video on both those clickthroughs)

Meanwhile the federal Minister for Emissions Reductions - last seen 12 days ago in this post, his criminal investigation there now referred to the feds by state police - has just issued an opportunity for business donors to pay to attend the cricket with himself on Saturday.

https://i.imgur.com/liY1QOQ.jpg

"Catastrophic" bushfires are predicted to hit his electorate of Goulburn on Saturday, 200km and 3 hours away from the cricket ground.

(xpost: my second link is the second click in Vernon's link)

On new year's eve a friend from AUS showed me a photo from a friend of hers. It's this guy and his wife, who live in the bush, standing outside their house, both wearing masks, just waiting for the fire to come up. Apparently the smoke levels were 18 times the WHO limit. They have a purpose built fire safety retreat thingie and have smeared all the trees within 50m of the house (with what I'm not sure) but they say that will only do so much. If it's a big wall of flame apparently the air itself above the canopy fuels the fire - the oils from the eucalyptus trees are released by the heat and act like lighter fluid in the air. They're just trapped out there. It's fucking mental!