I expect to wake up tomorrow morning to a lot of bad news here in NSW. Wind picking up and darkness is a recipe for more casualties. And there is still no end in sight with any of these big fires. At least Scomo is getting a lot of flak for how useless he is. Maybe those people will also finally figure out they are voting for the wrong party that is not going to fix any of this.
I saw on CNN the vid of the firefighters driving through the blaze barelly excaping with their lifes. Holy fkn shit I dont want to be in their shoes.
Yeah NSW not going great. The western Sydney suburb of Penrith (which is near where fires are encroaching on the Blue Mountains) today recorded a murderous maximum of 48.9C (120F) which is the hottest temperature ever recorded not just in Penrith but in the entire Sydney basin. The previous mark was 47.8C in 1939. That also made Penrith the hottest place on the planet today. Canberra also eclipsed its previous highest maximum by a full degree.
Climate change is here. We smashed temperature records last summer, we’re just backing up and doing it again this one. This has to be the worst fire season on record. Just absolutely none of this is normal.
It is now.
PM Scott Morrison’s response has been mystifying. Just sort of wandering around blathering uselessly. It’s not actually hard to respond to a crisis like this, you grab a microphone and give stirring speeches about how we’re all in this together and whatnot, GWB after 9/11 style. He seems totally incapable of doing it. I’m no politician and I reckon I could have a better crack at it than he’s managing.
It’s pretty hard to do that when you desperately want the thing that’s happening to not be true. The guy is in full blown denial and is hoping this all goes away soon. It won’t ldo.
Couple other before and after photos of the Southern Ocean Lodge, just looks like a nuke went off.
Greta’s barely 17
And Meat Loaf’s obsessed
https://twitter.com/independent/status/1213450394002755585?s=21
His name is Robert Paulson.
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These are such stupid articles … “Meat Loaf (72) doesn’t beleive in Climate Change” is the non-story - but bringing Greta into gets those clicks
One person died of a heart attack defending a property, 4 firefighters injured and lots of property lost overnight in NSW and that is considered to be a great outcome. There are now a couple of days with better conditions that will allow the fires to be controlled but still not good enough to extinguish them.
The writer of this piece is a lead author on the next IPCC report.
You’re welcome buddy. Please like, comment and subscribe.
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There is nothing about the science here that surprises me. I’ve come to terms with the science part. What really moved me about this article and made me feel more genuinely afraid for our future was the inadequacies in governmental handling of the situation.
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The blatant corruption and authoritarianism currently on display in the US and other western democracies does not get me near as angry as the failure to take climate change seriously. It’s the one political issue right now that I think might justify violence.
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Rapidly accelerating change seems to be everywhere. Even anecdotally the climate in the region where I have lived most of my life isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago. I even asked my Trump voting mother who is 65 if she thought the climate was the same as when she was young and she acknowledged it wasn’t.
We just had the hottest summer on record where I live. I live in an area that normally has 4 seasons and this year it was 100 in October and has not really gotten below highs in the 50/60s yet except for a day or two. There hasn’t been snow other than flurries in years now. This is not normal.
All the problems we have with our government all stem from the same thing and this is no exception. The corporate co-opting of governments around the world is why nothing can ever be done. Corporations themselves are destroying the planet and eroding democracy and freedom like you would read about in a dystopian novel for money that a limited few super rich people don’t need and could never spend.
I want to believe that Bernie can win, but deep down I think I know this machine that will kill us all sooner rather than later will never let that happen. How could they, they control the politicians, the media and the voting machines. A huge percentage of the population have bought into the propaganda they constantly beat us over the head with because they lack the ability for critical thought due to the hollowing out of the public school system over the last several decades.
In short WAAF and I legitimately feel completely hopeless about it. Climate Change is example 1A of why.
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I clicked through from that previous article and found an article by the same author from August 2019 called The Terrible Truth of Climate Change. I’m actually going to put a trigger warning on it and encourage you not to read it if you think it will bother you. I’m posting it because it made an impact on me. There’s a natural reaction to think “things can’t be that bad, we will muddle through somehow”. I feel that inclination myself, but it’s important to recognise that there’s no basis for it other than the salience of everyday experience, where nothing has gone catastrophically wrong. The planet has been through major change before. The presence of the human species doesn’t mean it can’t do it again.
Even with the 1°C of warming we’ve already experienced, 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. We are witnessing catastrophic ecosystem collapse of the largest living organism on the planet. As I share this horrifying information with audiences around the country, I often pause to allow people to try and really take that information in.
Increasingly after my speaking events, I catch myself unexpectedly weeping in my hotel room or on flights home. Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief. It’s the only feeling that comes close to the pain I felt processing the severity of my dad’s brain injury [an eventually fatal hemorrhage]. Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery.
And then:
The most comprehensive summary of conditions experienced during past warm periods in the Earth’s recent history was published in June 2018 in one of our leading journals, Nature Geoscience , by 59 leading experts from 17 countries. The report concluded that warming of between 1.5 and 2°C in the past was enough to see significant shifts in climate zones, and land and aquatic ecosystems “spatially reorganize”.
These changes triggered substantial long-term melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, unleashing 6 to 13 metres of global sea-level rise lasting thousands of years.
Examining the Earth’s climatic past tells us that even between 1.5 and 2°C of warming sees the world reconfigure in ways that people don’t yet appreciate. All bets are off between 3 and 4°C, where we are currently headed.
A friend of mine thinks climate change will lead to civilisational collapse. I don’t go that far myself, but I think it will be the defining event of this century, perhaps as bad as a world war.
My biggest fear apart from what global warming will do the planet is how it will change society. Unfortunatly the biggest skeptics of global warming also tend to have the most money and the biggest military. For example: If access to clean water becomes scarce does anyone believe that these countries wont use their military to either protect theirs or go after another countries resources. We will probably get back the law of the jungle. And you cant do much against it nor really prepare for it.
I’m with your friend on that. We’re not doing nearly enough about it (and the rest of the environment) and the effects will be catastophic … but hey we can plant trees.
Not saying that planting trees isn’t a good thing but it’s not the answer - we need a fundamental shift on how our civilisation works - globally - if we are to avoid the Thunderdome.
Digging stuff out of the ground and setting fire to it needs to stop.
(NSFW language)
Safety glasses off motherfuckers!
… and he’s completely right about being adults - these people should be mocked not elected
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