A question about climate change/global warming.

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

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.

Here's how this went btw:

The Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction claimed in parliament that the Lord Mayor of Sydney was a climate hypocrite, brandishing documents showing the city council had spent “$1.7m on international travel and $14.2m on domestic travel” for councillors.

The actual figures were *shakes notes, adjusts pince-nez* $1,727.77 on international and $4,206.32 on domestic travel.

He claimed that as the PDF and Word versions of the actual publicly-available documents on the City Of Sydney's website had different line spacing, this meant it was possible that they'd changed the figures to frame him at some point. Maybe they forge all their own documents, all the time!

The minister had amusingly proven himself to be a liar and internet forger[/url a few months earlier, forgetting to swtich accounts when congratulating himself on his own facebook. He had been czar Minister for (Law Enforcement and) Cybersecurity until a few months before that.

The council referred the matter to the state police.

The state police declined to investigate the recent Minister for Law Enforcement, and referred the matter to the federal police.


The federal police have today [url=

AFP on dropping Angus Taylor investigation: “no evidence to indicate (he) was involved in falsifying information ... the low level of harm and the apology made by the Minister ... along with the significant level of resources required to investigate were also factored”. pic.twitter.com/d3Qv5jHbKf

— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) February 6, 2020

(They are not denying that a forgery was done in order to enter lies about state climate policy into federal Hansard, nor that it was done by the Minister's office. Just saying that they're not gonna ask anyone who done it.)


Accountability at the highest level for the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, while the country remains on fire and announcing new emissions-increasing policies. Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.

derp

― MOAR PETE (sic), Thursday, February 6, 2020 7:23 AM (yesterday)

(got an error message about tags but proofed and ctrl+f'd it, mb a glitch in the parser with that long Graun url? sorry folks)

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.

Took three days for this guy, Matt Canavan, to use the efficient hate-speech distribution network Facebook to argue that regulatory laws - which he also refers to as "green tape" - are a chokehold on enterprise.

His given example is that if protective laws had existed 300 years ago, white settlers would not have been able to murder native Aboriginal people in Australia to seize the coal-rich land, and could have been successful in murdering and/or deposing the King of Hawai'i.

Just a banner week for federal energy ministers. Fuck it, mask off, eh?

For a moment earlier today it was the same temperature (65F) in Antartica* as in Honolulu.

*Warmest temperature ever recorded there.

Accountability at the highest level for the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction

The Guardian is currently seeking a review of a Freedom of Information request that sought documents. Taylor’s office refused to release several documents, including one which was described as an email from “an external third party”. It was withheld on the grounds that it would adversely affect the business affairs of that person.

oh well, if it would 100% definitely affect the business affairs of a secret private entity, we DEFINITELY shouldn't investigate crimes or climate-related fraud by the Minister For Encouraging Global Warming To Continue Apace

Rain in New South Wales in the last three days has helped to put out 30 separate fires that have been burning since 2019!

Is... is this amount of rain a sign of healthy, balanced climate?

just a classic wet weather prank!

I dunno that it's the safest to be lying face-down in water that's filling an asphalt area which hundreds of cars drip oil and pump exhaust into every day, especially when the water will have probably overflowed from drains also containing garbage & sewage, but you gotta get clout somewhere.

That town is on the coast, though, the lads should probably pop over and have a healthier swim in the Pacific Oce--


CNN: The Pacific Ocean is so acidic due to rising carbon levels that it's dissolving Dungeness crabs' shells

LNP senators know that seizing the opportunity to boldly set a global agenda and revitalise our economy by switching to renewable energy would only cut emissions and create jobs, two absolute wastes of time when the real reason for bushfires is out there. Instead, we must expand governmental spying powers to prove that a "sinister collective" is responsible for all the arsons by cross-referencing all citizens' metadata.

It's probably those pre-teen arsonists coordinating over Whatsapp to set fire to all them crabs, too.

As of the election last year, the IMF estimated government subsidies to fossil fuel companies to be $29 billion in Australia, or 2.3% of GDP.

The operators of a coal-fired electric power station notified the New South Wales government in 2015 of their intention to close in 2022. At this stage it had been operating at half-capacity for two years, due to its age. Even the local member, frothing coal lobbyistenthusiast, said at the time "it's 45 years old. It's clapped out. It's now the most inefficient and dirtiest power generation in the country".

Said operators have refused goverment entreaties to put any money into repairing it ahead of the closure. After five years prep time to shift to other means of supply, the government has now planned to spend $300 million to keep the station burning coal (but only outputting half the power it should) for another six years.

https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/6623434/federal-government-slammed-over-300-million-liddell-extension-proposal/

"Liddell is a dud and should shut by its use-by date in 2023, or even sooner," Nature Conservation Council campaigns director Brad Smith said.

"If the government is going to spend $300 million on energy, it should invest in pumped hydro and batteries, not extending the life of a dirty old clunker like Liddell. Keeping the station open would be an obscene waste of taxpayers' money."

The leaked report found keeping Liddell open would make the grid more unstable and add significantly to Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

"Instead of obsessing about coal," Mr Smith said, "there are 21 storage projects that are ready to roll in NSW that the Federal Government should expedite funding for."

Here's Exactly How a Trump 2020 Win Would Spark a Nightmare Climate Scenario

The Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm, calculated in December that for humankind to keep warming below 2 degrees, we need to reduce emissions a colossal one-third from current levels by 2030. They identified five crucial things that could get us globally on track toward closing that gap: the European Union adopting a Green New Deal, Brazil halting its destruction of the Amazon Rainforest, China’s economic growth and the emissions it produces slowing to a more sustainable rate, and demand for electricity in India growing only moderately and being met mainly by renewables. The fifth one is Trump losing in 2020.

A re-elected Trump would keep dismantling environmental rules —he's slashed 95 in total so far— that limit fossil fuel companies or other polluters of the atmosphere. And he would make the damage much harder to reverse by continuing to stack the courts with conservative judges who tend to rule on the side of greenhouse gas-spewing corporations.

There already aren’t many years left to reduce emissions on the scale necessary to avoid further devastation. Trump's second term would at the very least be more wasted time. If the U.S. is to have any hope of meeting the 1.5 degrees goal, its emissions need to be reduced 40 or 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. But the Trump administration has wiped out Barack Obama–era emissions standards for cars and trucks, allowed oil and gas producers to release all the methane they want and engaged in many other acts of climate destruction. This would leave only six years to close a massive gap after the end of a second Trump term, after which U.S. emissions cuts might only hit 12 to 19 percent, according to the Rhodium group. And that estimate is based only on existing Trump rollbacks.

This seems extremely bad

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

“But that is not the main point,” said Tinsley-Marshall. “I think it’s pretty clear that something pretty catastrophic is going on.”

Ten years of why are bees disappearing? articles are now giving way to climate change probably articles, too

We can use AI to train drones to pollinate, right?

Yeah, I've definitely noticed the bugsplat thing – used to have to wash the car after a London-Glasgow trip, now it's basically clean.

global warming's terrifying new moth

Maybe bugs are evolving to stay away from highways?

ftr this shit (insect numbers crashing) absolutely terrifies me, beyond most things

xp: It's everywhere, even protected parks/wilderness.

Hallmann et al, 2017. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PloS one, 12(10), p.e0185809.

:(

Detailed visual piece on the spread of the Australian fires, the role of climate change, and the future

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-19/australia-bushfires-how-heat-and-drought-created-a-tinderbox/11976134

(Open on desktop and let it load - intensive illustration using satellite imagery.)

Tom Beer is often referred to as the ‘godfather’ of bushfire and climate science in Australia. In 1988, he released the first research on the effects of climate change on bushfires in Australia.

While researching in 1987, when climate science was in its infancy, Dr Beer attempted to find a year where the temperature had varied more than 3.5 degrees above the average so that he could study what happened in that year as a model for the future. He was unable to find one.

“Even finding a year that was 1 degree warmer was impossible,” he says.

And according to Dr Beer, the 2019 fires may already be the new normal, even if the world limits emissions under the Paris Agreement.

“Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement is more or less, in terms of bushfires, what you’re seeing this year. If we get up to 3 degrees, then the fires are going to get worse.”

A similar multi-media piece on the health effects of days / months of living in smoke:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2020/feb/20/the-toxic-air-we-breathe-the-health-crisis-from-australias-bushfires

“We’re all currently living in a big experiment,” says Donna Green, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales’ climate change research centre.

“We know it will be bad, we just don’t know how bad.”

In Sydney and Canberra, hospitals were pushed to breaking point.

David Caldicott, an emergency department doctor and senior clinical lecturer at the Australian National University, describes smoke-filled rooms, a jump in emergency respiratory cases and “many anxious parents with kids with asthma”.

The smoke that blanketed the city was so bad that it caused MRI scanners to stop working.

“Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement is more or less, in terms of bushfires, what you’re seeing this year. If we get up to 3 degrees, then the fires are going to get worse.”

this is some exemplary scientist deadpan here

Pyrenees having a totally normal one pic.twitter.com/pUJZRwdzkV

— Elisha Sessions 🆒 (@elishasessions) February 20, 2020

the weather in France has been so fucked this winter

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-reef-building-coral-disaster-traits-akin.html

Morrison and the LNP government have announced that they will be defunding and closing the Bushfire and Natural Hazard Cooperative Research Centre established under the previous Labor government, a few days after the centre published a report on a conference analysis re: Are we ready for cascading extreme weather hazards beyond our experience?.

The conference was held immediately before six months of cascading extreme weather hazards.

LNP: the Bureau of Meteorology is a hoax

January 6 2020: Morrison announces

Bushfire recovery will take priority over the budget surplus in a mammoth federal program starting with a $2 billion fund that could surge in size over the next few years to rebuild after the summer crisis.

Cash payments are being promised immediately to help families, employers and local councils to recover from the bushfires, with the outlays expected to trim the budget surplus this year by $500 million.

March 2 2020: the government admits that this fund does not exist at all, let alone that it could surge in size, and argue that this doesn't matter because it was always notional. When a senator explains that "notional" means "imaginary," they withdraw the statement and ask for time to look up the word and submit another meaning in writing later.

(5 farmers have been issued loans.)



January 19 2020: the goverment announces that $76 million will be taken from the $2 billion fund in order to protect and restore the tourism industry in the wake of the bushfires (if they ever end).

(https://www.sbs.com.au/news/federal-government-rolls-out-76-million-tourism-package-in-wake-of-bushfires)

March 5 2020: the tourism industry is told there will be no financial support to help them weather impact of the coronavirus, which is already three times larger than the impact of the bushfires.

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/tourism-industry-calls-for-coronavirus-support-in-addition-to-bushfire-package)

I worry that your posts itt are causing me to overappreciate other government's responses!

hey, they can respond when it's urgent: before entering parliament, the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction set up a fake company in the Cayman Islands to "protect internationally significant wetlands from dying" by selling water to the government, and three years ago the government paid this one company (started in a tax haven by a government minister) $80 million dollars for water that does not exist.

This week, as the wetlands are still endangered, they're looking into giving it another $2 million for water.

Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.

https://www.ftm.nl/dutch-multinationals-funded-climate-sceptic

The Netherlands' leading climate denier died in 2008, and was an inveterate hoarder archivist. Researchers going through his SIXTEEN METER HIGH stack of papers have found detailed records on how Shell, Bayer and other corps paid him €500K over nine years to undermine public belief in climate change, and humanity’s role in it.

The Managing director of Shell, Huub Van Engelshoven, personally commissioned him from 1989.

Böttcher used the money to set up an international network of climate sceptics. He produced multiple reports, books and opinion pieces. In these he wrote, for instance, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist and that CO2 is not dangerous, quite the opposite: it’s ‘good for plants’.

The doubt created led, among other things, to a lack of political support for regulatory measures with regard to CO2 reduction during the 1990s.

His 24 sponsors finally stopped funding him in 1998, when they concluded that the signing of the Kyoto Protocol had created a tipping point at which flat denial was no longer viable.

Doctorow: "We know who his political allies were: the VVD party. When the Netherlands' dikes fail and the country begins to drown, these politicians might still be running for office."

There are still multiple contained and uncontained fires in the state of Victoria, Australia, including a peat fire.

The Labor premier of Victoria has today lifted a moratorium on onshore gas exploration, with drilling and extraction to begin from July 2021.

sneaked that one out, the fucker.

Meanwhile Zalli Stegall has paused her climate change bill.

multiple contained and uncontained fires in the state of Victoria, Australia

Although the last of the fires in neighbouring New South Wales was extinguished after a fortnight of torrential rain suppressed most of them, and another two weeks of effort by firefighters on the reduced blazes. Thus ending 240 days of uncontrolled fires in the state. Maybe the rain will also have softened up the ground for the fracking that got licensed a few months ago?

Meanwhile, in the next state up the coast, documents and video have leaked from the Indian-owned Adani mining company, revealing that their announced plans to export 10 million tonnes of coal at first, expanding to 27 million tonnes over time are a cover for plans to export 40 million tonnes at first, expanding to ONE HUNDRED MILLION TONNES, nearly double the limit to which they are regulated.

"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.)

― don't care didn't ask still clappin (sic), Friday, January 3, 2020 9:20 AM (two months ago)

now that the firefighters can go back to applying for jobs and thus qualify for the dole, it was raised today: by 48c a day.

Scott Morrison has launched a high-paid National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission, to advise the government on appropriate actions to take. It comprises:

- Morrison's departmental secretary
- the Minister for Fascism's departmental secretary
- the head of the Finance Department
- the Managing Director of a Hong Kong-owned company that bought large parts of Australia's electricity supply when they were privatised, and operates gas and coal stations in three of Australia's five states
- the former CEO of Australia's national telecommunications agency, who oversaw it being privatised
- the 73-year-old former owner of a trucking company, who is worth $880 million
- one former elected member of Parliament

and is headed by a former mining magnate, who was in the news three weeks ago for the amount of insider trading he has done this year, buying up shares of a gas drilling and pipeling company of which he is deputy chairman.



Here is a list of the doctors, epidemiologists, nurses, scientists and hospital administrators on the commission:

Due to Coronavirus, the US Forest Service is "canceling prescribed burns across the West, potentially making the upcoming fire season worse."

cool cool cool

"The federal government is pushing for expansions of coal mines to keep people in work, amid expectations that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs due to the economic slump caused by COVID-19."

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/coal-mine-expansion-even-more-important-20200324-p54dcx

Their fucking answer for everything. How about employing them to install solar or mine any of the other things that are in the ground in Australia (Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Graphite ...)

Due to the coronavirus, Parliament is not sitting until August.

Therefore, opposition MPs are not able to question the government government on, today, approving ten years of logging native forests in Victoria, or yesterday approving coal mining underneath the Greater Sydney reservoir, which supplies water for the most populous region on the continent.