Greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing is now 4.1 W/m2 larger in 2021 than in 1750. This paper from James Hansen et. al. estimates that we are in for at least ~4 °C of global warming, for a doubled atmosphere CO2. ( 3.5 - 5 °C ) That is given the fast feedbacks operating. Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone -- after slow feedbacks operate -- is about 10°C . Civilization development was masking the rising rates of warming from GHG until about 1970, with aerosol cooling. Aerosol cooling has declined since 2010, because of reductions in China and from shipping. Three urgently required actions are: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) purposeful intervention to rapidly phase down our present massive geoengineering of Earth’s climate, and 3) renewed East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.
Earths Oceans continue to absorb the brunt of rapid global heating in 2022. Around 93% of our incoming radiation excess is steadily raising the temperature of our oceans. Ocean temperatures are measured by a distributed fleet of measurement buoys. Another 11 zettajoules of energy was added in 2022. We haven't yet felt the full warming impact on land, due to a prolonged La Nina phase. But another El Nino excess heat climb will return again soon, this year or next.
Over the last decade, our oceans have absorbed something like 100 zettajoules. All of that comes from the current net average of three quarters of a watt per square meter of surface area retained by our atmosphere. Global heating from our greenhouse gases continues to add up.
The uncomfortable truths lie somewhere far outside our Denialist and Technophile mindsets.
It looks like our global fossil fuel civilization will keep burning until it runs out of fuel, and warming will continue past 1.5C in the early 2030's and then 2.0C and some more. Net zero by 2050 is far too late to save anything at all. Governments take global ecocide very seriously. It is now a serious crime in Australia to do anything which impedes the business as usual of burning fossil fuels.
Article from Rueters - "Dying lands: Farmers fight to save the 'skin of the Earth".
Repeated extreme weather events from global heating are increasing the rate at which civilization is denuding its soil quality and thickness. Civilization was already doing this much faster than nature can rebuild soil from bedrock minerals. This confirms how agro-systems collapse is happening now in many places. Widespread malnutrition and starvation risks are sure to follow in many regions.
There will likely be no political surprise or acknowledgement of this in our general media-ocracy, as our typical politics will continue to promote fossil fuels growth and dependency everywhere, supported by limited "green" energy systems. The news will continue to be full of celebrity doings and positive spin for business as usual, while ignoring the long predicted bad news. This is a global tipping-over point of our civilization. There is more global heating still to come.
A new era in seriously tackling climate change means that we also need to seriously tackle the protection of our carbon-dense native forests. Failure to properly protect forests makes no environmental sense nor any economic sense in a carbon-constrained world where dealing with climate change is a must.
We all have carbon hunger, but climate policies of NAB are slicker and sicker than politicians and insurers small print -
NAB’s policy is a cynical attempt to wordsmith its way out of the climate crisis - Jack Bertolus, Australian Campaigns Coordinator, Market Forces
The world is forced to have a future with less and less, except that those with large repositories of money think to avoid going there.
A proposed pipeline of many new coal mine projects in Australia, the world’s second-biggest exporter of the fuel, are threatening to lock in decades of new carbon emissions and challenge the country’s promises of bolder climate action.
Dire warnings about our future destination are plentiful. We now have access to the "growing pains" and lessons of more than five decades of climate science and study of our biophysical environment. Our failures to heed them are becoming fatal. Our political and institutional systems will need to collapse or drastically change. Our impacts are the products of our population and affluent consumption. Our species future if we can still have some, will support far fewer people, and much diminished rates of resource consumption per person. A general outline of the processes we shall undergo is found in many publications, but a recent humble and sympathetic account of our self imposed predicament is in the book "An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity" by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen.
We have to figure out a different way of being in the world.
Picnics for Nature Event. Sunday 16th October, Parramatta Park, Manu Pavilion, 12 - 2 pm.
Dear NAB,
Rumors of absolute failures of your fossil fuels de-finance policy will be going global. I will put them on my website https://parracan.org. Why do bank executives not heed you-tube presentations by climate scientists? Is it a condition of outrageous highly paid employment? So sorry that you all will soon need to lose your jobs, in order to allow complex biosphere life to keep going.
There are at least 5 global climate tipping-overs already happening in accelerating motion. Melting permafrost, melting poles, Greenland ice pouring into oceans, Amazon forests now a carbon source, Northern Boreal forest dieback, fires all over, global photosynthesis decline, more and more positive feedbacks to our fossil fools global heating. The only solution will be imposed by nature and is a drastic reduction in our resources consumption and our population. Impact = P*A*T. Plus all our infrastructure to be washed away by sea level rise and escalating floods. You have a world to lose.
We’re in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.
National Politics almost completely hides our global climate crisis. Trends evidenced in Australia is that administrations still give out fossil fuel mining rights like lollies. Australia pays out more in mining subsidies than it receives back in royalties. Foreign mining corporations easily fund our governing political parties from their export revenues. Our foreign mining owned media blinkers electoral sentiment. Even our banks are part-owned by foreign banks with mining investments.
Money growth is ruling very badly and has no effective policy while global climate goes into failure mode. It seems that total systems collapse is the only possible consequence. Meanwhile in the USA there is evidence of a sudden Administration Panic to "find a quick solution". (Monumental plans to fix the planet) It is something to do while continuing public denial of worst case acceleration that has proven to be faster than climate model predictions.
Maybe we shouldn't have got into this known mess in the first place. To fall back to biology based economics after rapid departure of fossil fuel burning is still not in any nations stated political plans. But it is sure to come, as it is the only possible, really well known, but the most inconvenient "solution". No technology is likely to change that. Our power-down is going to be full of risks and down-fails. So fossil fuel politics has no public mitigation plans, that are going to be needed for sure because of the oncoming rapid fossil fuel addiction withdrawal.
Support for our dense populations that need a large global agriculture base is most likely to be a downfall. Production will decline from climate change fragility, loss of fossil fuel inputs, and accelerating soil exhaustion. Global heating will suppress the physiology and ecology of all "primary production". This is a problem even for sparse populations of hunter-gatherer existence. As the crisis unfolds all national governments will fail completely, just like the failure modes they are practicing now.
New coal and gas projects in Australia that are still being approved by our mining-paid politicians are bad case of eco-suicide from delusional insanity. These people need be thrown out of office for taking money from tax-payer subsidized projects that work against global climate safety.
Current oil and gas global expansion plans are to carbon bomb the Paris Climate Agreement. No doubt they will keep doing this until the biosphere is definitively near death, unless they are definitively stopped.
Every new fossil fuel mining project in Australia is yet another global carbon bomb that future climate will not tolerate.
Tree planting in Granville and Merryland parks went ahead as planned. A total of 300 new trees are now taking advantage of our spring rains.
Trees are an important part of the total web of life which maintains our biosphere. Thank you to all the volunteers and government agency which made this enhancement of our local environment possible. Something to outlast our fossil fool governments.
Climate wars are not over yet
There is a big problem with "climate wars" being declared as over, as was echoed by Australia prime minister and climate wars apologist Mr. Anthony Albanese. We, the consumers of the biosphere, are still here. The climate wars only end when our industrial civilization downs its fossil fuel weapons and surrenders, or dies. Not a predicament we want to take too long thinking it over, but we are taking our own sweet time.
Our industrial civilization has been expanding by its exploitation war against nature and the global climate for at least 150 years. The climate war is a side effect of the general war against nature of industrial civilization powered by fossil fuels. Heat from accumulated greenhouse gases is now fighting back with a growing vengence. Blow back consequences and pay back reparations will continue long after our last era built concrete and steel structure crumbles and rusts. Global industrial civilization will soon be the biggest war loser. We have already pushed our luck far too much, with our massive ecological overshoot and interference with multiple other biosphere systems.It seems quiet on the battle-front in Eastern Australia at the moment. Normal quiet activity of daily life is fossil fuel intensive. The latest Australia federal government quietly goes about its fossil fuel intensity support business.
Jared A. Brock shares the environmental alarm that many now feel, in a water shortage that is now global (except on east coast of Australia, burdened with "La Nina") He also cites "Ancient hunger stones are re-surfacing to warn us about the coming famines". Current summer heat waves and drought are raging in the Northern Hemisphere, which bring low water in rivers, uncovers old "hunger stones", as harbinger of crop failures and starvation.
Australian Government will likely never need to legislate a carbon price to encourage decarbonisation again. Local electricity retailers are now making big losses, and must pass on their high energy costs to customers. Paying more for energy will bankrupt many businesses. All thanks to our many decades of Australian "Takeaway fossil fuels" export policies. Local electricity bills will keep soaring upwards.
Not much of all those windfall profits from exported coal and gas are ever likely to return to Australia. This energy trap and money theft has been engineered for you by ten years of culpable governments that served big coal and gas mining first. Australian governments opposed all sensible climate and energy policy. Australian voters were most easily fooled by "crap" prime ministers and even crappier mass media. Our rising energy costs already magnify inflation, will close many businesses, and shutdown much of the Australian economy. More toxic medicine of rising interest rates further is surely going to make this worse. As if impoverished Australians still have an over-supply of money in their pockets.