Southern Australia has been suffering an unprecedented heatwave over the last week. In Melbourne we have experienced successive daily maxima of 43.4, 44.3 and 45.1 degrees Centigrade (corresponding to 110.1, 111.7 and 113.2 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). The temperature finally reached 45.1 degrees C on Friday 30 January — the first time temperatures had been above 43 degrees for three consecutive days since records began in 1855. The heatwave caused bushfires and blackouts, crippled the Melbourne train network and caused a record number of ambulance operations (the number of people who died will not be known for a week or so).
The human physiological thermostat attempts to keep us at about 37 degrees C or about 98..6 F , the normal range being 97-100 F – which is why we have been struggling in Melbourne in this last week.
Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and a World leader in annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution, threatening billions of impoverished non-Europeans with climate genocide – but the pro-Coal Federal Government still refuses to rake effective action against man-made global warming that acutely threatens the Planet (see “Australia’s “5% off 2000 GHG pollution by 2020” endangers Australia, Humanity and Biosphere”) .
Perhaps this shocking heatwave (above 43 C for 3 days, and it will be in the 30s for the next week in Melbourne) will make Australians demand action from their Federal Government which chooses to IGNORE the advice of top Australian, UK and US climate scientists about the acute seriousness of the Climate Emergency.
Australians are currently facing a severe heatwave with temperatures of 40-plus Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the southern parts of the country, making it the worst heatwave in 100 years. And the Australian government says it’s a sign of climate change.
“Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the heatwave, which started on Wednesday, was the sort of weather scientists had been warning about.
“Eleven of the hottest years in history have been in the last 12, and we also note, particularly in the southern part of Australia, we’re seeing less rainfall,” Wong told reporters.
“All of this is consistent with climate change, and all of this is consistent with what scientists told us would happen.”"
A new scientific study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in USA shows that “there’s no going back” from climate change caused by carbon dioxide. The study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, has reached the shocking conclusion that the effects of man-made climate change are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped.
“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”
Yesterday Al Gore testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about repowering America and the need for USA to resume global leadership on the climate crisis. You can read his opening statement below.
Al Gore is also calling for you to support his energy and climate plan which will create 100% electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years while creating millions of green high-tech jobs:
In a confidential security review by Australia’s Defence Force, named “Climate Change, The Environment, Resources And Conflict”, the Australian army says climate change will pose “one of the biggest threats to security in the Pacific“. The confidential security review obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper also says that the natural resources under the melting Arctic ice may spark a global conflict.
“”Environmental stress, caused by both climate change and a range of other factors, will act as a threat multiplier in fragile states around the world, increasing the chances of state failure,” said the summary, published in the Herald on Wednesday.
“The Arctic is melting, potentially making the extraction of undersea energy deposits commercially viable. Conflict is a remote possibility if these disputes are not resolved peacefully,” the assessment said.”
According to the security review rising sea levels, caused by climate change, will “affect nations and islands with low-lying coastlines”, create climate refugees from the Pacific islands and result in more illegal fishing as food recourses will become rare.
Top German scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber warns that climate change is now happening much more quickly than anyone thought was possible.
In an interview with Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and acts as an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues, said that “the threats posed by climate change are worse than those imagined by most governments.”
“In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now. We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”
Schellnhuber points out that the Arctic ice is melting faster than previously expected and says that “the entire climate pattern at the North Poll has been disrupted to the extent of causing irreversible change.”
Australia and the World are acutely threatened by man-made climate change and it may already be too late to stop catastrophe – however there is GOOD NEWS as well as BAD NEWS.
The BAD NEWS is that top UK climate scientists, Professor Kevin Anderson and Dr Alice Bows of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, made the following shocking conclusions in a 2008 paper in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: “According to the analysis conducted in this paper, stabilizing at 450 ppmv [carbon dioxide equivalent = CO2-e, atmospheric concentration measured in parts per million by volume] requires, at least, global energy related emissions to peak by 2015, rapidly decline at 6-8% per year between 2020 and 2040, and for full decarbonization sometime soon after 2050 …Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6% per year), it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO2-e … Ultimately, the latest scientific understanding of climate change allied with current emissions trends and a commitment to “limiting average global temperature increases to below 4oC above pre-industrial levels”, demands a radical reframing of both the climate change agenda, and the economic characterization of contemporary society.” [1]
Yet, for example, Australia remains the world’s biggest coal exporter, the OECD’s worst annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter and a world leader in per capita GHG pollution. Extrapolating from US Energy Information Administration data on Australian coal and liquid natural gas exports in the last decade, the recent decisions of the Australian Federal Government mean that Australia’s annual Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution will actually INCREASE by 40% over the 2000 value by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. [2]
Thanks to Customize.org, one of the most prominent and well-established desktop customization sites on the web, and their Gaia project you can raise awareness for climate change with beautiful styles and themes for your computer desktop, iPhone, music player and instant-messaging program.
I am myself using the visual theme for XP and I must really say that this desktop theme is really beautiful, especially the Gaia icons. If you want you can also get the Gaia theme for the instant-message client Miranda and for the music player Foobar. And you can even enjoy the Gaia theme on your iPhone.
“Climate change and the conservation of our planet is one of the most impartant issues facing us today. Inspired by Live:Earth, a group of Customize.org members tried to find a way of contributing their own part. But how could a website about desktop customization help to combat global warming?
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has in a preliminary report has concluded that last year the global mean temperature was 14.3 °C which makes 2008 “the tenth warmest year on a record that dates back to 1850.”
“The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990–1999.”
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia says that the global mean temperature for 2008 “is slightly down on earlier years” due to La Nina, an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that has a cooling effect on the earth.
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