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.
Rivers are drying up and lakes are shrinking with extreme heat in central China provinces. Drought is declared.
Climate change hits with harder heat waves every summer season. Our predicament is dire. Net-zero will be an end result for human species. As we don't really give up, climate catastrophe will drop us there.
"The premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
Heat waves are more dangerous to us than we think. A practical laboratory study shows that sweating fails to maintain core body temperatures at wet bulb temperatures of 31 °C and greater in healthy young adults. This is much less than the theorized limit of 35 °C
Fossil fuel addicted nations of the global north know they are on a bad path, because of global heating and finite resources, and they still compete to grow their economies and consumption. Livelihoods depend on oil. Food requires fertilizer, often made with gas. Gas can be used for cooking. In Sri Lanka, has undergone "involuntary fossil fuel withdrawal" - cold turkey style, and is now completely bereft of fossil fuel supply. Everything has stopped. People can't travel, can't cook, can't get food.
All that’s happening is that the poor are being made homeless, the rich are acting holier than thou, and the only people with a plan are being lied about or just ignored.
Western politicians have no systems plans to cope with fossil fuel withdrawal. They have no idea how to deal with coming supply collapse. Every meaningful climate mitigation plan requires a permanent major reduction in global demand for fossil fuels. Instead we have political systems of buttery smooth denial of any need to prepare for rapid fossil fuel withdrawal, mainly because the towering systems of wealth inequality will result in outbreaks of violence. This one lie of always available fossil fuel energy has spawned entire tribes of systemic and institutional liars in current national governments.
Gas Emissions Craters (GEC) are exploding in Siberia as the permafrost melts - like a teenager coming down with Acne. Major carbon sinks move towards failure around our planet. The Amazon Rainforests is now considered a carbon source. Our overheated oceans may become so choked with heat and carbon dioxide they stop obliging to absorb more of our insults. Such are dangers being faced by all life on this planet, as human industrial civilisation has refused to stop growing. It is all becoming the stuff of biblical "Revelations". One would think our pentacostal prime minister should to Glasgow to lap it up, but no, Australia and the fossil fuel world isn't ready for this.
. . . unless there are immediate rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that limit warming to close to 1.5° C or even 2° C, the problem will extend “beyond reach” and beyond any chance for some level of control.
NSW nature conservation council needs your support to continue to pressure the NSW government to finally stop the logging destruction of our remaining native forest areas. It can be done. The industry is uneconomic. 91% of timber is from plantations, and it needs to be 100%. We need native forest ecosystems to stop declining and grow in size and health, to enable the survival of the creatures that live in them, including koalas.
I know it is a bitter pill to swallow, but the only real way to slow global warming in any noticeable way is to stop anthropogenic CO2 emissions FOREVER. There are no post-facto technological ‘capture’ or ‘remediation’ techniques that exist now or “could be developed” that would actually work as “silver bullets” of salvation; they would only ‘work’ as money making scams with which to gull those despairing of the ‘loss of easy living.’
- "Notes on Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming, Acidified Oceans, and Weathered Rocks" - Manuel Garcie Jr.
Climate Council Public Petition to sign: To play its fair part in the rapid, sustained reductions required globally, Australia should aim to reduce its emissions by 75% below 2005 levels by 2030, and to net zero by 2035.
Nafeez Ahmed publishes "How to Save the World in 15 Years. PART TWO." The IPCC is politically climate conservative. Climate tipping points are irreversible and evidencing now. Not just the climate. The latest data also suggests that more than half – six out of nine – planetary boundaries appear to have now been crossed by human civilisation.
New is latest IPCC report "Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis" The hard work of many, it has fully documented and projected climate past and potential futures, with lots of corroborating detail, numbers and graphs, and improved datasets. Climate science is more certain, errorbars a little smaller. The website "Real Climate" scored a flurry of new posts from notable climate scientists. Future scenario pathways, our warming future, will depend on choices of today's governments and their money and power brokers. Just how much denial will they be allowed to get away with? Chances of scraping under 1.5 C° of warming in the next thirty years depends on keeping with the best "low-emissions scenarios". Nations need to work more on their NDC's, the "Nationally Determined Contributions". Global cooperation needs to come from a willing positive force from home, not a negative arm-twisted condescension imposed externally.
Analysis reveals that “Net Zero 2050” strategies will lock in many decades of unnecessary fossil fuels use well past 2050, with an unsustainable, business-as-usual economic pathway, dangerous “offset” trade-offs, and unacceptable risks of unstoppable climate warming. - Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration
Simon Michaux, expert on minerals processing, reports on our real system limits for mining of minerals, particularly those required for IT and green technologies. A detailed PDF of same report is available from here.
Robert Hunziker declares we have started the rolling climate apocalypse. Cities, infrastructure and people of fossil fuel civilization are not designed to withstand extreme heat and rapid flooding events. Evolved ecosystems are dying from the advanced human onslaught.
ParraCAN has its first online survey here.
The Coal Industry has Manipulated and Controlled Australia through the Liberal National Party and Murdoch NewsFork for decades, and looks forwards to ruining it while it profits.
Even aiming to stay within the global warming range of 1.5 to 2 degrees C, the earth systems are pushed on a path that takes us to the kind of climate of 3 million years ago, Pliocene or even 50 million years ago, the Miocene. The Holocene, which nutured our civilizations, is over forever.
Right now, to avoid the extreme, conditions of the Miocene, not compatible with human civilization at all, and insure that only Pliocene conditions are reached, a rapid, global exponential decarbonization is required
David Suzuki points out, that a recent climate science paper says there remains only a 5 percent chance of staying below 2 degrees this Century, and we have actually more chance of reaching 6 degrees of warming (10%), than staying below 2 C. So we'ed better get on with it, as a global apex species, because even 2 degrees is not favourable to the long term survival biosphere apex species such as ourselves. Australia is especially singled out for its rigged corporate games in government..
Everything politicians think they know is most certainly wrong for the real world. Global governments fixation on mutual traded, competitive, exponential, fossil fueled growth. This is the worst possible, long term option ever. There is no wriggle out of contract consequences - Making a Hell of Earth. So what is the cause of this collective insanity? Rapid extinction is nature's unthinking plan for a species that collectively destroys its foundational environment.
The Global Carbon Project, which collects and analyses our global carbon behaviour, shows that nearly everybody is misbehaving.
Growth in global carbon emissions in 2018 looks to be around 2%, which is exactly tied to the rate of economic growth (by GDP)
Growth in Gas was the worst at 3.0%, and almost certainly involves a growth in total methane leakage. It is not provable that the rise in global carbon emissions with GDP has produced a similar rise in global well-being.
New record high of carbon dioxide emissions of 37 billion tonnes for 2018, says we are going to fail very badly.
Humanity are still trying to collectively have infinite growth on this finite planet. Here in Australia, our Prime Madman Scott Morrison, keeps defiantly shouting his "Strong Economy" slogan, in the tones of "Resistance is useless", while Australia burns hotter. After Albert Einstein, we could say that only one thing is infinite, and that is human collective stupidity.
Absent any serious form of global self-control, human global demolition will be future choked by several possible natural "Limits to Growth". Given our massed social and technical ingenuity, we might even manage to have several at once. We might escape the global decline in essential heavy fuel oil supply to power our global big machines, or spend all our energies against the inexorable rise in new climate disasters. This is probably already out of our control, as we struggle to keep creating new limits by growing our ongoing demolition of biodiversity and natural sustainability.
If enough people demand it, governments could declare a climate emergency tomorrow, and we could all get on with the job of fixing it.