A question about climate change/global warming.

Parliament House, two weeks ago / today.

Two hours ago, fire reached a recycling plant nine miles / 15km from here. Toxic black smoke is spreading through the area, and the Canberra airport has been closed.

It rained in Melbourne, washing smoke and dust into the Yarra river.

Scotty claimed today that Australia's emissions will be cut by 42% over the next ten years!

(He has no policy changes or plans of any kind to reach this made-up target, the Department Of Environment's best projections are for 4%, and nearly 80% of Australia's 2020 permitted emissions have been generated *checks notes* ...already, by ... *checks notes again* ...the bushfires.)

Maybe he plans to pray it away.

As repeatedly noted, Morrison is a Pentecostal worshipper with a separate personal mentor who runs the largest prosperity gospel grift in the world. By inference, he believes God wants to destroy the planet, and that death is God's punishment for being poor. Coal companies give you hundreds of thousands of dollars if you give them $27 billion in subsidies and the ability to stop agriculture and destroy the homes of traditional residents. Why would you pray that away?

The producer of the Jersey Boys movie also says that the US has somehow reduced emissions more than any other country, despite pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and that divesting from fossil fuels won't do anything to reduce emissions.

When asked how that would affect the U.S. economic model, Mnuchin took a swipe at Greta Thunberg.

“Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” he said. Then following a brief pause, he said “it was a joke.”

“After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us,” he concluded.

“Economics,” you say pic.twitter.com/on8C0h69sm

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 23, 2020

Parliament House, two weeks ago / today.

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Tuesday, January 21, 2020 9:50 AM (one week ago)

On Monday, an army helicopter was on reconnaissance to clear landing zones in a National Park next to Canberra, in case a fire started and drop zones were needed to fight it.

The landing light on the bottom of the helicopter started a fire in this nature preserve that spread by 400ha an hour, and was at 7,900 hectares by Tuesday evening.

Fire in Canberra, Australia’s capital. Looking south over Lake Burley Griffin. Parliament House is in the left of the shot. pic.twitter.com/masgYPEOSp

— Ash Andersen (@TheAshAndersen) January 28, 2020

RAW timelapse footage of the last few hours - Orroral Valley fire -Out of control #canberra #australia #AustraliaBurning #AustralianFires pic.twitter.com/akBjC8AIof

— Martin Ollman (@martin_o) January 28, 2020

The government is still on summer holiday, and has not returned to Canberra in nearly two months.


Also in Canberra:

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.

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Monday, January 13, 2020 2:02 PM (two weeks ago)

"Tech giant Amazon has apologised after a technical upset caused a website providing crucial emergency bushfire information to crash.

For several hours on Thursday afternoon, the website Canberrans are meant to go to for emergency information was taken offline as a dangerous fire threatened properties south of Canberra Airport."

Our PM says apparently Australia is doing enough and we should get onto adapting to being on fire every summer. (PM remains a prick)

Is the Australian Government part of a global conspiracy to worsen Climate Change? Probably.

Read through and see if your government is implicated too!

These silver dribbles? They’re solid metal. The heat from the fire at Yowrie literally melted the bottom out of this car. Glass has melted too... that means temps of around 1400 degrees. It’s difficult to fathom. #yowrie #cobargo #AustraliaBurning #bushfiresAustralia pic.twitter.com/UoZ0FgKtMM

— Ruby Cornish (@rubycornish) January 28, 2020

bush fires can't melt steel cars

pre-teen arsonists, pushing the cigarette lighter in on every grandparent's car when they get a lift, done the 2019-20?? bushfire season

jfc

This Ceramic Artist Survived the Australian Wildfires by Crawling Inside His Kiln

One single fire that the NSW volunteer firefighters have been combating since November 27th is now classed as Contained.

Minister For Fascism, who's given himself more spying powers than any governmental agency has ever held in Australia, and recently spent $100 million reopening one single concentration camp to hold one single family, is asking people to donate to the Red Cross

Scotty has today come up with a way to make this concentration camp more economically efficient: Australians exposed to the coronavirus will be evacuated from Wuhan to the island and quarantined, as long as they agree to pay for their transport and containment

because it's very important not to allow anything from foreign nations to affect the health of Australians

Christmas Island, located 2,600km from the Australian mainland in the Indian Ocean, is the site of a notorious immigration detention facility that currently houses a Sri Lankan family of four.

unbelievable

PM says apparently Australia is doing enough and we should get onto adapting to being on fire every summer

what's the cost going to be of retrofitting every motor vehicle on the continent with allover drenching protection tanks like this?

This vision from the Dunmore brigade of the @NSWRFS from early January is terrifying. It shows how quickly a fire can move 🔥 pic.twitter.com/dhrnpBX1un

— James Glenday (@jamesglenday) January 30, 2020

wow, that footage at the end is really is terrifying. amazing how the fire leaps the highway so easily

And yet ScoMo wants us to create more fire breaks because they are so effective.

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/

But on this particular Wednesday, as the winter sunlight in his living room was dimming and the charger for his spare ankle bracelet battery flashed on a nearby shelf, his optimism about his epic battle against one of the biggest oil companies in the world seemed to be flagging. “They are trying to totally destroy me.”

Donziger is not exaggerating. As he was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And since then, Chevron has continued its all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law. Chevron has hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him. As a result, Donziger has been disbarred and his bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment, faces exorbitant fines, and has been prohibited from earning money. As of August, a court has seized his passport and put him on house arrest. Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $228 billion, has the funds to continue targeting Donziger for as long as it chooses.

But the latest twists and turns in the Chevron case may also be particularly bad news for climate activists. A mere 20 companies are responsible for a third of the greenhouse gases emitted in the modern era; Chevron ranks second only to Saudi Aramco among them. And it’s increasingly clear that addressing the climate crisis will require confronting these mega-emitters, whose resources for litigation dwarf that of any individual.

Making Chevron and other companies clean up the messes created by their oil production will speed the transition away from fossil fuels, according to Rex Weyler, an environmental advocate who co-founded Greenpeace International and directed the original Greenpeace Foundation. “If hydrocarbon companies are forced to pay for the true costs of their product, which include these environmental costs, it will make the alternative energy systems more competitive,” said Weyler.

Chevron, which has a market capitalization of $228 billion

just wanna point out that this is still less than we're spending on those F-35s that don't actually work cuz we had to make them suitable for dogfighting even though we haven't had a dogfight in like 50 years

Aside: that's not the problem with the F-35. The F-35 doesn't work because 1) the AF & Navy decided to make the next gen combat aircraft a technology demonstration vehicle; 2) it's a jack-of-trades plane, poorer at air superiority, strike, or close air support than existing platforms; 3) stealth against short band radar isn't stealth anymore; 4) the VTOL Marine version requires too many compromises on the AF and Navy STOVL versions, 5) it just can't carry enough munitions, internally: short wave radar stealth requires 2-4x as many sorties.

Until the military goes back to the more functional approach of separating research (tech demonstrators) from major procurement (engineering established tech), we'll see more procurement fiascos like the F-35, Zumwalt-class destroyer, Littoral Combat Ship, the Army's Future Combat Systems, etc.

As for dogfighting, the US hasn't engaged in a near peer for 50 years. The Israelis have in the last 35 years, and their planes engaged in dogfighting when the spendy air-to-air missiles were depleted.

Xps to Donziger story ... that is fucked up. What's he supposed to have done that requires ankle bracelet and house arrest?

making an airplane literally invisible isn't cheap

Trump says he might deploy some F-35s to a local air base, saying workers here will see them come in. He says, "Actually they're totally stealth, so maybe you won't see them come in. You won't see them come in."

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 30, 2020

GREAT NEWS!!!

Scotty and Gladys are announcing a detailed collaborative scheme to lower emissions and transition away from coal!!

It is: to frack the shit out of the state that still has 80 fires blazing across it, to produce flammable fossil fuel.


https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/scott-morrison-strikes-2b-gas-deal-with-nsw-20200130-p53wa7

no big deal

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/fracking-boom-tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere/

^^^joe biden doesn't want you voting for him

vote for bernie sanders! joe biden IMPLORES YOU!

JOE BIDEN COMPELS YOU

Those pictures of the sun came out a couple of days ago and it made me wonder again why, when we’ve got a self-perpetuating nuclear reaction a million times the size of Earth that will essentially never stop and whose radiation we can capture in a number of ways, we still think it’s a good idea to DIG UP OIL AND GAS AND ROCKS AND BURN THEM???!?!

it’s like living next to Lake Superior and ripping up all of your property to install rain collecters or something

that will essentially never stop

err actually it'll burn itself out in 4.5 billion years so we'd better stick with the stuff in the ground that makes billionaires, thx

It will go red giant and annihilate us all at some point in that four billion year plan. Might have to nuke such a threat to our rules based World order and keep digging coal!

Fracking uses water, a substance not only in demonstrably short supply in Australia, but also largely stolen and sold offshore already.

Gas is the biggest driver of both emissions and power prices in Australia in the last five years.

Scotty and Gladys are outright using a state of emergency resulting from fossil fuel policy and climate change to make both much, much worse, while claiming the opposite.


Remember two months ago, when this revive merely fretted that governments might switch their denial to "it's too late to do anything"?

Is this the driest/hottest part of the year or may there, god forbid, be worse weather to come?

― Good taste, bit Victorian but who isn't? (jed_), Monday, January 6, 2020 1:09 AM (three weeks ago)

Horrible fire day across Victoria & New South Wales in Australia today.

Pyrocumulus, gravity waves embedded in these huge plumes. pic.twitter.com/cqzVNg4huy

— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) January 31, 2020

Is there any news about other parts of the world, though? Let's go to the Colorado Sun.

Fabric curtains stretch across the huge Warragamba Dam to trap ash and sediment expected to wash off wildfire-scorched slopes and into the reservoir that holds 80% of untreated drinking water for the Greater Sydney area.

In Australia’s national capital of Canberra, authorities are keeping a wary eye on burning forests and bushland, hoping a new water treatment plant and other measures will prevent a repeat of water quality problems and disruption that followed deadly wildfires 17 years ago.

There have not yet been major impacts on drinking water systems in southeast Australia from the intense fires that have burned more than 40,000 square miles (104,000 square kilometers) since September. But authorities know from experience that the biggest risks will come with repeated rains over many months or years while the damaged watersheds, or catchment areas, recover.

And because of the size and intensity of the fires, the potential impacts are not clear yet.

“The forest area burned in Australia within a single fire season is just staggering,” said Stefan Doerr, a professor at Swansea University in England who studies the effects of forest files on sediment and ash runoff. “We haven’t seen anything like it in recorded history.”

The situation in Australia illustrates a growing global concern: Forests, grasslands and other areas that supply drinking water to hundreds of millions of people are increasingly vulnerable to fire due in large part to hotter, drier weather that has extended fire seasons, and more people moving into those areas, where they can accidentally set fires.

More than 60% of the water supply for the world’s 100 largest cities originates in fire-prone watersheds — and countless smaller communities also rely on surface water in vulnerable areas, researchers say.

When rain does fall, it can be intense, dumping a lot of water in a short period of time, which can quickly erode denuded slopes and wash huge volumes of ash, sediment and debris into crucial waterways and reservoirs. Besides reducing the amount of water available, the runoff also can introduce pollutants, as well as nutrients that create algae blooms.

What’s more, the area that burns each year in many forest ecosystems has increased in recent decades, and that expansion likely will continue through the century because of a warmer climate, experts say.

Most of the 25,000 square miles (64,000 square kilometers) that have burned in Victoria and New South Wales have been forest, including rainforests, according to scientists in New South Wales and the Victorian government. Some believe that high temperatures, drought and more frequent fires may make it impossible for some areas to be fully restored.

Why are the independent journalists of a small Colorado newsroom getting quotes from multiple foreign sources about the impact of fires on the other side of the planet?

In the Western U.S., 65% of all surface water supplies originate in forested watersheds where the risk of wildfires is growing — including in the historically wet Pacific Northwest. By mid-century almost 90% of them will experience an increase — doubling in some — in post-fire sedimentation that could affect drinking water supplies, according to a federally funded 2017 study.

...

Denver Water, which serves 1.4 million customers, discovered “the high cost of being reactive” after ash and sediment runoff from two large, high-intensity fires, in 1996 and 2002, clogged a reservoir that handles 80% of the water for its 1.4 million customers, said Christina Burri, a watershed scientist for the utility.

There's no current news about non-Australia parts of the world that should make us imminently panicked about the future of the planet, though?

A team from Scotland and Iceland compared photographs of Iceland's glaciers taken in the 1980s with present-day drone images.

They focused on the south side of the Vatnajökull ice cap, which covers about 7,700sq km of land.

Dr Kieran Baxter, from the University of Dundee, said: "We saw a staggering difference in a very short amount of time."

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/14B96/production/_109368848_3bdeec22-14f7-4cc9-a7c9-e7a715e38cc0.jpg

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!

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Friday, January 3, 2020 1:22 PM (four weeks ago)

at least there are strict regulations that protect the environment and wildlife when logging does take place

Victorian wildlife authorities are investigating reports of a "koala massacre" in the state’s south-west, with hundreds of the marsupials alleged to have been starved when their habitat was logged, their bodies then bulldozed into waste piles.

The deaths are believed to be the result of clear-fell logging of a plantation of bluegum trees, according to conservation group Friends of the Earth, with the operation leaving hundreds of koalas to starve, a version of events disputed by the logging industry.

Friends of the Earth said the "koala massacre" came to light when local activists saw bulldozers pushing the bodies of dead koalas into waste piles left over from the main logging operations.

Senator Molan, 'not relying on evidence' to form his opinion about climate change

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/04/im-not-relying-on-evidence-for-climate-change-jim-molan-angers-audience-in-new-look-qa

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?

― Now We Know (Sanpaku), Thursday, January 9, 2020 11:03 AM (three weeks ago)

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"

ten-year-old schoolgirls were threatened with force by police.

The Acting Prime Minister told the protestors... well, told reporters elsewhere - that they are "wasting your time" and should "Go and donate your time to Meals on Wheels and something like that."

tells Radio National that it is “pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies” and “inner-city raving lunatics” like Richard Di Natale and Adam Bandt from the Australian Greens that are “trying to get a political point score” for raising the link between climate crisis, drought and the devastating bushfires.'

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.

so today the former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce (fired two years ago after doxxing a woman who filed a sexual harassment complaint against him, then getting a staffer pregnant and lying about it while having moved out of his family home, and accidentally being a citizen of another country and ineligible for parliament) challenged McCormack to get his position back.

He lost the internal challenge, but a former energy minister resigned from cabinet in order to support him (and completely coincidentally announced that he had previously not disclosed his membership of a football club to which he had awarded a $20 million loan). The SMH's head politics editor reckons the two of them will be forming a bloc within the Nats to ensure the Coalition rejects any efforts by the larger party to gradually adopt less damaging climate policies.

All of this is happening because the government has gone back to work after their two-month summer break. Indeed, Barnaby argued in the party room

against “reactionary” climate policies in response to the bushfire crisis, accusing people of using the tragedy to push the “hobby horse” of climate action. He was backed by NSW National MP David Gillespie who suggested the party’s constituents did not want more action on climate policy, and it was not an issue being raised by voters.

(Four years ago this week, Barnaby was elected unopposed as National Party leader. A month ago, he released a video of himself screaming at clouds that he wanted the government out of his life. Yesterday he tried to become party leader again. The party chose to stick with the guy famous for writing a 1993 newspaper editorial complaining that “a week never goes by anymore that homosexuals and their sordid behaviour don’t become further entrenched in society... Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay.”)



Morrison's office issued eight pages of Welcome Back To Bothering To Work A Bit talking points to ministers, leaving bushfire response to the end, and insisting that ministers bluff and bulldoze questions about the ignored warnings issued re climate change creating dangerous bushfire conditions.


Barnaby vs McCormack wasn't the only turmoil amongst party leaders yesterday, incidentally: the national leader of the Greens (a Senator) resigned to spend more time with his young family, and the male co-deputy leader (a Melbourne MP) was elected unopposed in a secret internal ballot.

Meanwhile, Bob Katter (former Nationals MP 1993-2001, then rogue independent MP 2001-2011, now leader of the Katter Australian Party, which holds one seat nationally {Katter's} and three in Queensland state parliament) stood down in order "to spend more time targetting his enemies."

"I desperately need the time to get these dams built and to get at the throats of enemies - the free marketeers and the lily-pad left, and I simply can't do that while I have to do the leadership role," Mr Katter said on Monday.

He has handed the leadership to his large adult son. The KAP rejects climate science as "lightweight" and is opposed to an emissions trading scheme, but has some very vague and mild ecologically progressive policies, like being in favour of solar energy, and wanting to ban coal seam gas extraction... within three kilometres (2 mi) of an aquifer.

Being in favour of solar is good politics in a country with 10s of thousands of solar qualified electricians and a fucktonne of sunshine.

It's ludicrous that extensive solar panelling hasn't been a mandated part of all new building construction in .au for the last 35 years*, but Katter is not equipped to advocate for it, from any of the following disqualifiers: 1) has no legislative weight to apply to any lever of power, 2) has no worldview coherent enough to enable him to make a public case for either his many good policies or his extensive RWNJ policies, separately or as a suite, 3) is as mad as at least three cut snakes.

* solar water heaters retrofitted to red tile roofs were a fairly uncommon sight in the suburbs when I was growing up - imagine the level of takeup if the government had bothered to set up grid connection and rebates back then.

(Labor PM Hawke argued for action on global warming from his second full term in 1987, and environment minister Richo proposed an emissions target in 1989 - N I N E T E E N E I G H T Y N I N E - but saw it torpedoed by treasurer Keating, who went on to roll Hawke for PM at Christmas '91 and completely trash any chance for local action or global cooperation.)

Take it to an Australian politics thread fellas

we are all australian now

yesterday: Boris Johnson fires head of climate change conference, she reveals that he has told her he doesn't understand climate change

four years ago: Boris worries that the evidence of his senses proves climate change is happening, consults mentalist climate change denier Piers Corbyn for scientific reassurance

man it's a good thing that governmental policies have no effect on things like this!

Permafrost Is Thawing So Fast, It’s Gouging Holes in the Arctic

It’s perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback loops: As the planet warms, permafrost—landscapes of frozen soil and rock—begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, more thawing, and even more carbon emissions.

But here’s something you’ve probably never heard of, and it’s something not even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has really considered: thermokarst. That’s the land that gets ravaged whenever permafrost thaws rapidly. As the ice that holds the soil together disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up. Climate scientists have been working gradual permafrost thaw into their models—changes that run centimeters deep over decades or centuries. But abrupt permafrost thaw happens on the scale of meters over months or years. That shocks the surrounding landscape into releasing potentially even more carbon than would have if it thawed at a more leisurely pace.

Today in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers argue that without taking abrupt thaws into account, we’re underestimating the impact of permafrost thaw by 50 percent.

I wonder if we’re at t he point that ‘nonparliamentary’ removal of climate denier politicians can be justified...

fairly uncommon sight

derp