A question about climate change/global warming.

Rupert did not expect Morrison to get back in, btw - iirc he was reported as saying privately "I've made money under a Labor government before, I can do it again." The opposition leader had refused to meet with him, which Labor leaders will usually do even if they won't kowtow, but apparently the Melting Candle was astute enough to see that Morrison was an incompetent idiot earlier than the people who read his papers and watch his television.


But the Murdochs have actively campaigned against Labor on front pages since *checks notes* a mere 89 years ago, during the Great Depression.

He was influential in pushing Joseph Lyons to break away and form the United Australia Party, which then smashed Labor in the 1931 election. Lyons remained a loyal Murdoch deputy as Prime Minister, often visiting his Melbourne office and addressing his superior as ‘Sir’.

ethnicity of a well-known Aboriginal author and professor

Gee I wonder why he hasn’t gotten back to you. pic.twitter.com/8PHzCVdA40

— Dominic Kelly (@dominickelly_) January 10, 2020

BTW

“I KNEW PM SCOTT MORRISON AT UNI AND HE WAS A DICKHEAD”! Former Liberal Party insider spills beans on “zero talent weirdo”

After he was dumped as head of Tourism Australia ... with a $300,000 payout in his pocket, Morrison slowly but surely turned his eye to getting himself a cushy federal parliamentary seat so that he would no longer have to be a bureaucratic bovver boy at the whims of his political paymasters. ... But it didn’t go to plan, well not initially anyway.

He was smashed in the preselection by Michael Towke, an engineer from a Lebanese Christian background who was favoured by the party’s right faction. Morrison only received eight votes. Morrison – just like in the past few weeks – would need some help from the propaganda unit at News Corp.

Just four days after the preselection battle, Towke became the victim of a defamatory smear campaign led by News Corp’s gutter tabloid, The Daily Telegraph. Towke would end up suing News Corp, with an out-of-court settlement believed to be in the six figures being paid out by the media organisation.

However, the damage had been done. The NSW state executive of the Liberal Party – Morrison’s former fiefdom from a few years prior – refused to endorse Towke’s candidacy.

Australian (v Australian - Townsville) colleague of mine went camping with his family over christmas but had to evacuate when “Ah look, embers started landing on the tent, and then the campsite and farm and local town burned through. Grim”.

Which, yes, it sounds f’ing awful and dangerous, but i know it’s popular at christmas you do wonder at going camping during the worst bushfire season ever.

Out there before Christmas and there was ash on the sea - you could taste it when you went swimming, smoke alarms switched off across Sydney and a thick thick smog that obliterated the sun to a small red dot, like you were on an alien planet.

I realise Australians itt will probably have v first hand experiences here but as an outsider it was startling.

in other news, good thread analysing german energy production and consumption in relation to US and standard narrative of German nuclear/coal trade offs and green failures:

I guess, there is always space for another “Why are you closing your nuclear reactors Germany” story to rehash the same old points… It is unfortunate that angle gets that much airtime.

Here is what I wish we highlighted about the Energiewende. 👇
https://t.co/Z7suxux528

— Nikos Tsafos (@ntsafos) January 9, 2020

aggressively plugging it as proof that their ex-employees, current employees, the Guardian, the New York Times and much of Australian twitter are therefore engaged in a conspiracy by having said they've been denialists for the last 40 years.

https://i.imgur.com/rCdoN3N.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0XHyZ0b.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/DLHMI6Y.jpg

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

A dozen examples of rigorously

...debunked climate denialism from that one Murdoch paper:

There have been lots (understatement alert) examples of climate science denial at The Australian over the years. I have written about lots of them. A thread.

— Graham Readfearn (@readfearn) January 11, 2020

On climate change I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue. It's getting to where outright denial is becoming politically untenable and I'm convinced that they long ago mapped out their future strategy of morphing from 'it isn't happening' to 'it's too late to do anything about it/it doesn't matter what we do cause China and India'.

― viborg, Tuesday, December 10, 2019 6:53 AM

And here's a thread of Morrison on TV an hour ago explaining that this is the new normal, that the change we need to make is changing the law so the Army can seize and take over towns come to rescue people when they catch on fire and all the water has already been sold to China. No other change is possible.

Morrison has previously argued, repeatedly, that our strategy for climate change is to "meet and beat" emissions targets. (He also strategises on meeting them by gutting targets at international conferences, and offshoring our emissions.)

Now:

The fires themselves are exacerbating global warming, too, with fire-induced thunderstorms pumping soot, ash and chemicals into the upper atmosphere. Satellite-based estimates of greenhouse-gas emissions from the fires show they may be contributing the equivalent of a typical year’s worth of Australia’s emissions from burning fossil fuels.

^ From a Washington Post story on how a new "megafire" (formed when two merely enormous fires joined, at the Snowy Mountains in NSW) is larger than New York City.

The estimate on animals killed has now been raised from half a billion to over a billion.

Murdoch paper, the herald sun has got bored with the fires, only two page on the fires and it’s all about recovery, nothing on the mega fires merging. Of course there’s the letters page a peta credlin in which, remarkably, there has been a simultaneous change in th language of the knuckle draggers from ‘back-burning’ and ‘management’ to ‘prescribed burning’. As I the state government hasn’t completed its ‘prescribed burning’.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for a newly woke Andre Bolt whenever he gets back from whatever seal clubbing holiday he is currently on.

"Police are now working on the premise arson is to blame for much of the devastation caused this bushfire season. A strike force will investigate whether blazes were deliberately lit, and bring those responsible to justice."

1.2 million hectares have burnt in Victoria so far. 385 of those (or 0.03%) have been officially attributed to suspicious circumstances.

(I can't find more current figures right now, but as of the beginning of December - a week before this thread revive - 10% of forest in NSW national parks had burnt, 20% of World Heritage-listed land in the Blue Mountains had burnt - before major fires, let alone a megafire, let alone coal seam fires, had even started in the area - and rainforests that have never caught fire in known history had burnt, destroying entire histories of biodiversity.)

One can only hope that some editors and ScoMo himself are arrested for waisting police time.

A dozen examples of rigorously debunked climate denialism from that one Murdoch paper

And a substantial thread specifically debunking the unsigned editorial from yesterday:

Okay. I can't help it. I'm sick. I'm addicted. I have to do a line-by-line breakdown of The @Australian's mind-blowing editorial.

Somebody help me. Rescue me from the abyss. Whisk me from oblivion, I am spent. This is so WILD. pic.twitter.com/bpTcVnWfAi

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) January 11, 2020

fuckin immigrants

The second-most liked comment on the editorial blames immigrants for accepting climate science??

Every single one of the top most-liked comments re-hash denialist tropes.

The Oz is reassuring itself here. It's a massive self-help therapy session, squeezing its eyes shut. pic.twitter.com/ia5ZQ3XMAe

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) January 11, 2020

The relentless spread of the #bushfires down the Australian east coast over the past four months #AustraliaFire #BushfireAustralia

(#DigitalEarthAU Hotspots data from Sep 3 2019 to today; full screen recommended) pic.twitter.com/50XLhMzTmh

— Dr Robbi Bishop-Taylor (@EarthObserved) January 7, 2020

Siemens:

Innovations that improve life. For business, for society and for each individual. This is Ingenuity for life.

Also Siemens:

"We heard a lot of protest about our involvement in a monstrous new coal mine that might straight-up destroy Australia, if not the entire biosphere, so we asked one LNP member what to do."

The Australian people clearly voted to support Adani at the federal election in May 2019, especially in regional Queensland. It would be an insult to the working people of Australia and the growing needs of India to bow to the pressure of anti-Adani protestors.

"Also, if we don't provide this infrastructure, another company will, so it literally makes no difference whatsoever whether we do or not. Suck our balls, planet."

"The government secretly abolished the native people's ability to control or live on their own land" = "the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples have 100% approved this foreign coal mine on their land!" - former Auschwitz contractors who used forced labour, today.

Bezos has announced that Amazon will donate $690,000 to bushfire relief in services, if agencies and government services switch their operations to AWS storage.

Metallica donated $750,000 in money. P!nk donated $500,000. An instagram sex worker raised $700,000 in donations in exchange for nude selfies.


Amazon paid $20 million tax on $2 billion revenue in Australia last year. Bezos personally donated $10,000,000 to an NRA-lobbying Super PAC in Septmber 2018.

jeff bezos start selling yr nude selfies on amazon marketplace u coward

why buy the pork when hackers gave away his hog for free

meanwhile, in the world of high finance

This headline is absolute bullshit and the article itself proves it.

Moreover, what a coincidence it is that the only concrete claim they make is that they’re getting out of coal when coal investments are down 75% since 2015 and insurers are no longer backing the industry. pic.twitter.com/SQEE8NfsSb

— David Weiner (@daweiner) January 14, 2020

And here's a thread of Morrison on TV an hour ago explaining that this is the new normal

Scotty has spent the week pushing the line that we need to rely on "resilience and adaptation." It's impossible to change our policies of setting fire to the planet, or to reduce carbon emissions, so we need to muster up the good Aussie spirit and just get used to everything being on fire.

Also Scott Morrison:

The Coalition’s decision to axe funding to a climate change adaptation research body in 2017 has left Australia “not well positioned” to deal with fires, the “silent killer” of drought and other global heating impacts, its director has said.

Jean Palutikof, the director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF), told Guardian Australia the decision to discontinue funding in 2017 – when Scott Morrison was treasurer – had hollowed out the research community and “the capacity to take action on climate change is smaller than it was decade ago”.

The research facility at Griffith University was established in 2008 under the Rudd government and continued under the Abbott government with $9m over three years in the 2014 budget.

According to the environment department, the body has produced 144 adaptation research projects since 2008 with a total of $56.3m in federal funding.

But in 2017, the Coalition gave the body just $600,000 to continue its existing online platforms that inform decision makers seeking to adapt to changes in climate, with no ongoing federal funding from 2018.

Palutikof said the funding cut had forced it to axe conferences for researchers and community workshops informing business, local government and citizens about their exposure to climate risk.

Palutikof warned that – although bushfire cooperative research centres have continued to receive funding – bushfire is “not the only risk”, citing drought and other natural disasters such as floods.

“I worry if it starts to rain and bushfires cease to be an immediate risk some money will be pumped in and then we’ll forget about it,” she said. “The government will call it adaptation and resilience but people will be left in the same vulnerable state they were when these bushfires hit.”

Ebony Bennett, the Australia Institute deputy director, said the decision to cut the NCCARF’s adaptation funding was “shortsighted” and “typical of the Coalition approach to climate policy”.

“Any economist will tell you an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,” she said. “The government’s new embrace of adaptation and resilience is welcome, but it’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach.

“To reduce the amount of gas and coal mined and burned in Australia is the [better] response … to prevent hotter and drier summers in future.”

Labor’s climate spokesman, Mark Butler, said: “The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments have cut funding for significant adaptation work at [science agency] CSIRO, completely de-funded the NCCARF and produced a national disaster risk reduction framework that failed to take climate change seriously.

“The 2017 review of climate change policies completely excluded climate adaptation.”

Labor’s criticism comes as the government held roundtables in Canberra to discuss the response to the bushfire crisis at which Ley met wildlife experts and Andrews met scientific organisations.

Suzanne Milthorpe, national environment laws campaigner at the Wilderness Society, said the wildlife roundtable had seen “strong recognition that we can’t go back to business as usual”.

“Australia was already the extinction nation, the bushfire crisis has exacerbated that severely,” she said. “We need not just to return to pre-bushfire levels but to aim for health and resilience and against further shock.

“This is an unprecedented catastrophe – the first at this scale – but it won’t be the last.”

are lachlan etc any better than rupert or has it gone beyond such pittances

― mookieproof, Saturday, January 11, 2020 3:55 PM (five days ago)

James is better but has had his independence broken many times over the decades since Rawkus

James Murdoch claims he has never watched Succession, the drama series that documents the professional and personal rebellions of a billionaire media family suspiciously similar to his own. But his comments attacking the family business’s record on climate crisis coverage – which blindsided other parts of the family – suggest he may have picked up a few pointers from the HBO show.

The declaration that he and his wife, Kathryn, felt “frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage” of the climate crisis, particularly the “ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary”, focused an awkward light on the family’s businesses – but could help James differentiate himself from his father, Rupert, and brother, Lachlan.

He has established his bold liberal bona fides by *checks notes* donating to Pete Buttigieg, joining the board of Tesla, and buying a stake in Vice. And his wife "has used Twitter to share links to stories about investment company BlackRock putting climate change at the centre of its investment strategy and a story in the Murdoch-owned New York Post suggesting conservatives have answers to climate change."

"resilience and adaptation."

This garbage is everywhere today. Along with the nuclear nuts getting invited to all the meetings.

We will be plugging coal/nuclear plants straight into the desalinators so we can continue to grow cotton.

It occurred to me looking at Au election maps that most of these fires have been in electoral districts won by the National Party. Has McCormack been similarly useless?

McCormack has today announced a new policy of the Morrison/McCormack government to lower vehicular emissions: reducing speed limits in areas used by pedestrians, cyclist and the chronically ill.

However,

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has backed the nation's $70 billion coal export industry, agreeing with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton that ending local exports would only increase global emissions.

We have magic carbon free coal here in Australia.

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

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

the Sydney Morning Herald, 1987

yeah but those arsonists tho

At least we can all agree that it's anthropogenic.

An LNP government ruled under PM John Howard for eleven years from 2006 to 2007 (more than half of that due to Howard's 2001 campaign lie that brown people drowned children, which led to the series of concentration camps on which Australia continues to spend billion$). Even before being elected, Labor PM Kevin Rudd and state & territory leaders commissioned a climate study by economics professor Ross Garnaut.

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

"Recent projections of fire weather suggest that fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense.

"This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020."

By... 2020, you say? Sounds like some science fiction bullshit.

"the weight of scientific evidence tells us that Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change".

"The risk can be substantially reduced by strong, effective and early action by all major economies. Australia will need to play its full proportionate part in global action. As one of the developed countries, its full part will be relatively large, and involve major early changes to established economic structure."

One of the report's key recommendations was the implementation of an emissions trading scheme. Rudd failed to enact a (pissweak) ETS, but an effective one was established by his successor Julia Gillard in 2011, in collaboration with the Greens.

Garnaut calculated that the overall cost to the Australian economy of tackling climate change, modelled under CO2 concentrations od both 450ppm and 550ppm, was manageable and in the order of 0.1-0.2 per cent of annual economic growth to *checks notes* 2020.

(In 2013, Rudd knifed Gillard, became PM again for a couple of months, and then lost an election to the Mad Monk, Tony Abbott, who axed the ETS and eradicated the Climate Change Commission.)

In 2009, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation also released a report on effects of climate change ar current rates.

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

Obvious disaster fantasies - even if climate change were real, surely we wouldn't be seeing changes like that as soon as 2020.

In 2014, Abbott cut $140 million in funding from CSIRO, resulting in 500 job losses, particularly in the area of climate research.

What would Professor Garnaut say if he'd been in any way accurate 12 years ago, and was thus worth listening to now?

"Although things are bad, they will keep on getting worse if the concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere keep increasing."

The report said there could be a 300 per cent increase in the number of days with extreme fire weather by 2067.

"It's in the interest of the whole of humanity that we move promptly towards zero net emissions," he said.

"Australia has a stronger interest in that than any other developed country because we are the most vulnerable of all developed countries.

"Australia will also be the biggest economic beneficiary of effective global mitigation because we have the best renewable energy resources and the best opportunities for capturing carbon in our geological and biological landscapes."

He's probably just looking to get another government research contract, though. Selfish prick.

from 2006 1996 to 2007

Have you noticed that every Facebook group is now about #AustraliaBushfires?

Another poster, Daniel Fanning, said he sarcastically wrote "please remember that climate change is the only factor in the fires" in VCE DiscussionSpace (a group about final high school exams in the state of Victoria) to challenge the way the group's 67,000 members were thinking about the fires.

"While I agree that [climate change] can exacerbate it, many people are claiming it to be the singular factor while ignoring other contributing factors such as arson."

Fanning doesn't think it matters that the group was created as a place to talk about study notes and practice questions, not politics.

"I feel it's a good place for people to voice their opinion and partake in discussion with people of a similar age. I don't mind the negative comments and feel they're enjoyable to read regardless."

Deputy Prime Minister (in November) said that only "raving inner city greenies" believed in climate change, today has said that it's really meddling kids responsible - “Most of these fires are being caused by little Lucifers running around with matches and firestarters and creating havoc" - in response to the state's Energy & Environment Minister noting that this is the hottest year in state history, surpassing last year, which was the hottest year in state history, and that record drought is a cause of extreme bushfires, which scientists predicted.

― insecurity bear (sic), Friday, December 13, 2019 9:09 AM (one month ago)

Yesterday, the (NSW) state Energy & Environment Minister told Sky News that "some of the most senior members of the government" were raising concerns about the Coalition's climate change policies.

"And they are not moderates. They are from the right of the party," Mr Kean said. When asked if this group included cabinet members, Mr Kean said: "in cabinet, absolutely".

"This is because their communities are crying out. They are listening to their communities saying 'We want you to protect our environment.' "

Mr Kean said there was "widespread support for the Prime Minister to take strong action when it comes to climate change".

"I understand a group of moderate MPs and MPs right across the party, from different states and different factions, all want to see decisive and responsible action."

Today, Scott Morrison responded on multiple TV and radio apearances "lol who the fuck are you, shut up and sit down, I'm the Prime Minister and you're just from a state government, you little pissant."

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

The show that Morrison regularly calls in to has been off air for summer holidays, but came back today. The host had some tough words for Scotty after his inaction and lying about his second taxpayer-funded overseas holiday in five months:

https://i.imgur.com/zNrBp7U.jpg

Ray Hadley also hasn't tipped his hand on climate change one oway or the other, previously. But he's getting a bit bloody peeved that people are now saying climate change is gonna happen, when they previously predicted "global warming" and "sea levels rising" and those eventually never happened!!!!!

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

Scott not only agrees, he furthermore advises Hadley twice that he is right.

bloody climate change isn't real! it's all underage arsonists

meanwhile in Canberra (where the federal government is located but Scotty won't live and commutes from a taxpayer-funded harbourside mansionin Sydney instead), it's still a few weeks before the government comes back from its own summer holiday. Let's see some video from this afternoon.

Hail destroying the trees at Parliament House.. poor gardeners pic.twitter.com/bHEES1yhHy

— Tamsin Rose (@tamsinroses) January 20, 2020

Yeah it really hailed.. pic.twitter.com/iEfG7iQ0ST

— Tamsin Rose (@tamsinroses) January 20, 2020

very fucking cunning arsonists, changing their tactics to throw cops off the scent

(late last week, some mild outrage sprung up about the Liberal (tory) government directing $100 million in sporting grants to projects exclusively in Liberal seats, with Morrison affirming that no disciplinary action will be taken against the minister who misappropriated directed the funds.

Today:
Scott Morrison's local soccer club boasted about funding weeks before grants announced

The president of the Lilli Pilli soccer club, Greg Storey, is director of an online male underwear store who was picked by Mr Morrison for a government board role when the now-Prime Minister was treasurer in 2018.

His five-year role with the Payments System Board required him to attend four meetings last year. He will be paid more than $300,000 over five years.

what a coincide-

Mr Morrison said when launching the clubhouse last year that he and Mr Storey had known each other since before he was an MP.

)

While the focus in on the Southern Hemisphere, I took a look at Moscow's weather

https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/russia/moscow/historic?month=1&year=2020

Every day in 2020 has been above 0C at some point. There's been a couple of lows at night of -6C, but most the lows are around -1C

2011-2019 had lows of -18C down to -30C, with very few days above 0C

2011-2019 Januarys

Hail at the National Film and Sound Archive HQ in Acton, Canberra 'punctured the roof like bullets'. @canberratimes pic.twitter.com/qIq1zqeIzq

— Tim the Yowie Man (@TimYowie) January 20, 2020

seems bad tbh

https://i.imgur.com/QdDqhV3.jpg

Parliament House, two weeks ago / today.

TBF really big hail, stand up paddle boarders being eaten by crocodiles and massive corruption scandals are what the news in January is meant to be about.

Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale

^ (abstract of an academic article)



Buzzfeed Asked All 77 Government MPs For Their Views On Climate Science. Two Got Back To Us

320 nectar bats were killed by hail , and more injured, in one Canberra park yesterday. These dudes could have pollinated regrowing forest / bush in the coming years, if the Territory gets one or towo without fires.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FBWIZwxc.gif&f=1&nofb=1

oh no, here's some really sad news :(

BHP, the world’s single largest mining company based on market capitalisation, has an issue with the Australian bushfires. It’s not that millions of hectares have burned, that an estimated billion-plus animals have lost their lives, or that the nation at large is currently breathing some of the most heavily polluted air in the world. It’s not that dozens of people have died or that thousands have been displaced. The issue BHP has with the Australian bushfires is that they’re damaging coal production.

The multinational mining, metals, and petroleum company claimed in an end-of-year operational review that smoke and dust from the fires had negatively affected the air quality at their coal mines in New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia and the one that’s been most widely affected by bushfires. If the air quality continues to deteriorate, they added, “then operations could be constrained further in the second half of the [fiscal] year [ending June 30].”

These constraints have thus far included machinery operating slower than usual as a result of reduced visibility, and staff taking leave throughout December to make sure their houses weren’t burning down — leading to reduced coal production.

Jeremy Moss, a professor from the University of New South Wales, pointed out last year that, "BHP's emissions from its global fossil fuel operations alone were more than the whole of Australia's domestic emissions… If BHP were a country, the products it produces would cause emissions greater than those emitted by 25 million Australians."

Australia exports about AU$67 billion (US$46 billion) worth of coal every year, and is the sixth-largest producer of fuels that release carbon, according to The New York Times. What’s more, a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Program found that these emissions are expected to double by 2030.

tfw the catastrophic side-effects of unchecked capitalism start interfering with your ability to do more capitalism

FWIW, a beautifully written first-person account from my SIL about living through the conflagration.

http://www.eleanorlimprecht.com/the-burning/

Three American firefighters died in an air tanker crash in NSW this morning.