A question about climate change/global warming.

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!

In that video of Morrison and his constituents: after Scott grabs the woman's limp hand against her explicit protests and then turns his back on her when she asks for him to give money to the Rural Fire Service, an older man rushes over and physically manhandles her away.

This seems to be local councillor and former mayor Tony Allen, who once sued a nun for defamation when she had written to the Premier about witnessing him abusing and threatening an Aboriginal woman in her own home, which he had visited to tell her and her husband to stop complaining about racially-motivated beatings they had suffered from white locals.

He won $65,000 compensation and costs.

Missed this link in the second-last line.

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

The Emergency Services minister for the state seems to still be on holiday in Europe, btw.

A thread mapping the last 70 years of bushfires in East Gippsland, a region of Victoria:

I grouped all fires per decade and excluded fires under 1000 ha to simplify the maps. I also excluded planned burns. No maps of fire are perfect so read them as indicative estimates. So - The 1950s: pic.twitter.com/w7jIZ2wIZq

— Dr Tom Fairman (@itsnotfairman) January 1, 2020

Wait until you get to the one that overlays December 2019 on top of all of 2010-2018.

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

Here's that Leave Zone - as in, every single person should get the fuck out within 48 hours - mapped onto London and NYC.

every single non-permanent resident person

"Catastrophic" bushfires are predicted to hit [Angus Taylor's] electorate of Goulburn on Saturday, 200km and 3 hours away from the cricket ground.

He represents the Division of Hume, which takes in areas already impacted by the Green Wattle Creek fire.

I know this specifically as I had to dodge the cunt on the way to the polling booth last year. I had family and friends stay at ours pre-Christmas, as their towns had the GTFO warning level and my location didn't.

(yes, sorry: as you probably figured, I typo/brain-elided after figuring out the distance and train/walk time from his actual office in Goulburn to the SCG)

(His primary office is in Camden, but your point stands.)

here's

The fires have fueled anger at Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, who has downplayed the role of global warming, opposed measures to combat climate change and rejected additional funding for firefighters. After widespread ridicule, last month he cut short a vacation during the crisis, a trip that critics said showed he did not take the disaster seriously enough.

On Thursday, Mr. Morrison was heckled as he visited Cobargo, a New South Wales village where fires have killed two men and destroyed the main street. He left hurriedly.

“You won’t be getting any votes down here, buddy,” one man yelled at Mr. Morrison as he returned to his vehicle. “You’re over, son.”

Mr. Morrison said he understood residents’ frustration.

“I’m not surprised people are feeling very raw at the moment. That’s why I came today, to be here, to see it for myself, to offer what comfort I could,” Mr. Morrison told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/australia/fires-new-south-wales.html

sonned

since there is nothing that humans can do to influence climate change, we should turn to the old ways and offer up our people for sacrifice to the gods, in the hopes that they will listen and save us. we should start by ritually sacrificing scott morrison in an elaborate pyre situated in the path of one of angry god's bush fires

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-18/marine-heatwave-kills-fish-as-australia-faces-record-temperature/11808268

apocalyptic

― hot nuts (small) (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, 31 December 2019 08:19 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i may have understated this

I say to those who are delaying action on climate change: Look at the blood-red sky and unbreathable air in Australia because of raging forest fires.

Our futures are all connected. That is why we must bring the world together and enact a Green New Deal. pic.twitter.com/GBQQpDc4vE

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 2, 2020

bernie take my (zero-carbon, renewable) energy

On the bbc lunchtime news today they led with the Australian bush fires, moved on to other stuff and then in the back half of the programme had a story about the floods in Jakarta and the rising death toll there and the record rainfall that’s twice the amount that qualifies as ‘extreme’ and why the fuck is this a totally separate item and why is the death and suffering of poor brown people due to the same underlying cause so much less newsworthy he yelled rhetorically into the gaping void. NB not trying to downplay the horror in oz here at all - sic, ed et al i can’t even imagine the nightmare you’re living through there

jesus christ the denialists in Bernie's replies there

I dunno if it's worse that Gladys thought she should get on TV making sad faces, or that she panics and slinks off halfway through the fire chief's words

Reminder that (the firefighters) are still volunteers, without breathing masks, taking unpaid time off work

Except for the ones that are unemployed: they have had their benefits cut off because they have not been actively seeking work. (The dole has not been raised in 25 years, incidentally. Housing prices have roughly quadrupled in Sydney in that time.)

Good news for the ones with jobs: it's been announced that they will receive (unspecified) compensation for up to twenty days off work, after the fires are over. Four months of fires so far, with another three or four to come, is less than twenty days, right?

(I'm in America myself now Nick, but obviously hooking myself as directly into the nightmare as I can manage, for self-care)

how is this playing politically?

One minister in the LNP NSW government, whose own electorate has been badly affected by fire, responded to the Cobargo heckling by saying "The locals probably gave him the welcome that he probably deserved."

(Don't imagine a saviour: no mention of climate change, weirdly for a guy who as Roads & Transport Minister has approved a foreign-owned eight-lane toll road that seized & evicted hundreds of family homes at below market rate and is going to dump out onto a two-lane street in my old neighbourhood, run by a consortium that had previously underbid and then collected massive cost blowouts in road projects around the world. Approved at a $10 billion tender, it is now projected to cost between $20 and $50 billion. Who can say! We definitely need to funnel more cars into the city though, so why not pay obvious fucking grifters whatever B I L L I O N S they arbitrarily demand for several decades, and when regular humans protest, literally fire every elected councillor in the areas of construction, and replace them with a consultancy firm before gerrymandering the councils away.

(He's got great ideas for raising funds to meet the shortfall, tbf: as Transport Minister, he has repeatedly advocated selling off all public transport: trains, buses, light rail and ferries. Has only privatised a few bus routes so far, though.)

very normal beach scenes, summer happens every year, stop catastrophising you demented greenies

https://i.imgur.com/xs4C2F3.jpg

thanks

Stay safe and have fun this new year, from all of us at ExxonMobil Australia.

— ExxonMobil Australia (@exxonmobil_aus) December 31, 2019

Jeff Bezos' newspaper: Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives are threatening to fire employees who have suggested the company could be a leader in the worldwide effort to avert climate catastrophe.

I shouldn’t read the letters page of the herald sun, not good for my blood pressure. However primitive is given to letter suggesting that some how the (not yet implemented) ban on logging old growth forests and the (not yet implemented) cull on feral horses and the (implemented) ban on alpine grazing along with the old chestnuts about forest management and back burning are given prominence (a few climate change ones as well).

I’m really fine, it all seems quite far away (it isn’t really). Melbourne is hazy today but no more than it would be immediately before it gets hot. It doesn’t smell smoky like it did in Sydney the other week. I’ve been trying to talk to my wife about moving to a more prepared an resilient part of the world but she doesn’t want to talk about it (we just bought a house). My existential panic is more global than local.

Six local governments and the Alpine Resorts in Victoria have been declared "a State of Disaster," giving authorities the legal ability to force evacuations and seize/make use of people's property.

This authority has never been enacted before.

We should hold a poll on whether Scott Morrison is thumped in public by a former fire chief, a currently serving firey or just a member of the general public.

Greg Mullins just compared Scott Morrison on Climate change your Trump on guns after a school shooting.

Greg Mullins - Former NSW fire chief who has been out fighting fires.

Scott Morrison - Sociopathic Thicko, alleged prime minister

Morrison has come up with a plan to mitigate the effects of climate change: sell off all national parks on the eastern seaboard for logging. No trees, no fires, no problem!

Note that even in this truly fucking insane statement, he makes sure to frame it as "the impact of the broader climatic effects we are seeing in this country" - Australia is only a small part of the world, climate change is global. Therefore Australia is helpless to actually lower emissions or stop carving the ecosystem apart to sell coal, and can only react to the world's effects on us.

(Also note that his sociopathy means he can only conceive of an entire continent having one coast, if he lives on that coast.)

great idea, to fight climate change, chop trees down. it's not like trees do anything to mitigate climate change anyway, they're just standing around taking up space and CO2