Tuesday 24th of December 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

we have no choice...

gap

Before Sir David Attenborough recently warned us about the lunacy of endless growth, I was writing a long article about this very subject and how to accept and prepare for the values of restraint... Unfortunately my computer is reaching the end of its useful life and as I was saving the pages it froze and killed off what was a rather angry rant...

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/attenborough-endless-growth-lunacy-20130525-2n3pg.html

The crash was only a coincidence, nothing more, not an omen... But even bad coincidences can have beneficial effects. I was annoyed of course, I had spent the best of three days carefully explaining the price of fish according to the Gus global-warming bible.  Thus this unfortunate event has forced me to rewrite my thoughts on the future of humanity in a changing climate and limited resources, though I might not do it in such an eloquent way as I thought I had done till then. 


There is no two ways about it, humanity has, is and will be changing the dynamics of the planet. I'll rephrase this: There is not two ways about it, humanity has, is and will be changing the dynamics of the SURFACE of this planet. Life on earth has been integral on the status of this thin layer in which it has operated since about 4 billion years ago. For example, it is scientifically accepted that the early life-forms helped in the formation of the atmosphere away from "acrid acidic smoke", into nitrogen and oxygen. 
Since then, the surface, which includes the atmosphere to a height of 100 kilometres and the oceans to a depth of 10 kilometres — has become a relative living space limited to about 6 kilometres up into the atmosphere and 1 kilometre down below the sea. That's it. We're crawlers under a low roof in a shallow pond. This is our world: the surface of a very lucky little planet — a small rock with a thin coating of mould on it. 
It's not lucky because of gods or demons, but because cosmic conditions and coincidences were accidentally productive into a combination and evolution of interactive chemicals within the surface that led to life on earth as we know it. 
Venus for example was not so lucky. It does not have a protective magnetic field to deflect the solar winds and its basic elements (as abundant as they are on earth) like carbon, oxygen and hydrogen mostly combined into CO2, instead of water. Result? The surface of Venus is far hotter (480 degrees Celsius) than it should be — even on the "dark" side — because of a greenhouse effect brought on by its atmosphere of CO2. 
On planet Earth, WE are a lucky part of life. But we are so keen to modify it for whatever reasons and eager to dismiss life's real processes with silly distracting beliefs about idiotic divinities. Some of our busy activities may be du to the natural ways animals feather their own nests plus improvements, others reasons rest in our undeniable unhealthy ability to lie to ourselves. We are the great deceivers. Homo deceptionem dolus... 
A vote of Tony Abbott is lunacy.
Often at dinner parties I raise the concept of global warming in the middle of conversation where people talk about frocks and shopping. It tends to stir the possum... Most of the people will say with confident aplomb that "I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion" which soon translates into "I don't care about it, all I want to do is get rid of the carbon tax because Mr Murdoch told me it's bad and Julia lied about it — so it's a vote for Tony because he promised to get rid of it and replace it, which he won't, with something that looks good with trees."
A vote for Tony Abbott is idiocy plus...
I would despair if I did not know better... So I explain the price of fish carefully to which I am told I "waste" an awful amount of time on this issue — global warming... One cannot win... These people are exclusively tuned to the dinosaurs: the Hadleys, the Jones and the Bolts. They read the Telegraph or the Herald-Sun... Actually they don't read. They glance at the headlines and know everything about the world, before, now and after.

Restraint versus growth
I will reiterate here that capitalism is not a system of governance but a tool for systems of governance.
Capitalism in the hands of conservatives ALWAYS leads to massive excesses of rich-poor disparity as well as to selected scientific deliberate misunderstandings in order to foster "unlimited" financial growth for the benefit of a few. Conservatives rely on our ability to develop narcissistic individualism and sociopathy to con people into a competitive style of behaviour. Conservative capitalism is based on the traditional power of royalty, of despotism, of warriors, of conquerors and dictators...
Capitalism in the hand of social-democrats (Labor, Labour, "Democrats") is generally savvily geared towards providing dignified life beyond survival for most people, including the "disadvantaged". Social-democrats are more aware of earthly sciences and of environmental concerns. Competition is moderated by rules to protect people from exploitation. 
Compassion translates invariably as "charity" for the conservatives. For the social-democrats, compassion is expressed as "human rights" which of course conservatives hate to the hilt.
All systems of governance rely on growth, though social-democracy is more "restrained" in the application of wealth creation in favour of the common good...
At this stage of humanity, there is less and less "room to move" for growth... Growth is killing off the planet. I mean the thin surface of this planet. The mathematics and the sciences tells this clearly if we pay attention. There is a cut-off point at which growth does not add up anymore, even if we rape the entire surface of the planet. 
A vote for Tony Abbott is a stupid vote.
Tony Abbott is the conservative leader of a party of ignoramus vandals... Genghis Khan he is not. He is not intelligent enough to be. But the bunch of ransacking loonies behind him are jockeying for the front job of placing their hands on the honey pot (whether there is a deficit or not is irrelevant) so they can reload the growth cart in favour of the rich. They don't even hide their gross ideology but they lie to achieve the purpose of their desires. 
The tool of capitalism requires growth. It's in its blood. Thus we need to URGENTLY rewire its core value towards restraint. This has to be accepted by all and achieved in efficient ways that won't make us bleed:
Growth will have to be written in existing wealth exchange, without relying on new input of carbon adding activities. 
Thus we need to invent, recycle, repair — cleverly within strict limits. 
The throwaway society needs to be killed off. 
Consumerism need to be restrained. 
Obsolescence needs to be drawn out on much longer terms. 
New illusions of wealth, work and entertainment need to be developed. 
World population needs to be pulled back from 7 billions to 5 billions — and should the future of this planet still be in doubt down to 3 billions. 
A vote for Tony Abbott is completely crazy.
Energy supplies need to be exclusively renewable by 2020 onward. We have six and half years to do this, WORLDWIDE. 
We need to get rid of the dinosaurian right-wing spruikers — those that push and profit from consumerism and are paid to foster scientific ignorance... 
Restraint has to become the new order.
Possible? We have no choice. 
The planet will have a big say, sooner than we think.

Gus Leonisky.... 

 

demining the negative media...

If there’s one thing the Murdoch media and their political acolytes do well, it’s angry negativity and manufactured outrage — and it may all end badly, says Duade Borg.

I spend at least a couple of hours each day scouring through the media landscape for news about Australia’s elected officials and how they are going about running (or wrecking) the country. It’s pretty much my morning agenda after rolling out of bed and pouring a coffee.

My routine involves visiting a few blogs and following links to news articles on Facebook. This is just my starting point, as suggested and related articles usually present a web of information I can easily access. I read articles as presented by all the news outlets, spending a comparable time across the big three in Aus — the ABC, Fairfax and News Ltd, as well Independent Australia and sites on The Australian Independent Media Network. I am pleased now to also add The Guardian Australia to this list.

Much has been said of the bias in Australian mass media and you could only possibly miss it with specific blinders. The Murdoch media, which myself and others have affectionately labelled “Limited News”, beats the “change the government” (notice their partiality to three word slogans) drum loudly and visibly — shamelessly and relentlessly, often without any justification or attempt to substantiate their spurious claims.

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/manufactured-outrage-and-aggressive-conservatives/

a beautiful symphony...

 

So I was worried. What on Earth were Australian green groups up to? Had police officials uncovered some campaign of sabotage? Had someone done something really stupid that would undermine climate campaigning around the globe? Was there a bomb involved? I was all the more worried because the news accounts made clear that one of my Australian colleagues, Blair Palese, was somehow mixed up in it. She’d never seemed violent to me, but it’s hard to know with people from another culture.

Climate change, after all, is basically a big maths problem, involving the quantity of carbon we want to burn and the capacity of the atmosphere to contain it.

It took me a while to wade through all the stories, one more lurid than the next (“Coal Activists’ Strategy Exposed”; “Minerals Industry’s Fury”) but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what had caused all the fuss. The secret document obtained by the intrepid reporters appeared to be a funding proposal from Greenpeace and some other groups called ‘Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom’ that had as its first priority “to get in front of critical projects to slow them down in the approval process”. To do this, it would work to “gradually erode public and political support for the industry” by, among other things, “lodging legal challenges”, providing “training, strategy and support for community groups” and “using a powerful visual communications strategy to tell the story of the impacts of coal and to articulate a different vision for the future”. They had other plans too: hiring “media officers” in Brisbane and Sydney, and perhaps even “organising and amplifying the voices of health professionals so that they play a central role in the debate over the future of coal”.

The reaction from government and industry didn’t make much sense. I’d always thought of Australians as a rough and ready sort of people, not prone to panic. The last time I’d visited, to contest the long-distance ski races at Falls Creek and Perisher Blue, people dismissed all sorts of actual troubles (sleet storms, fender benders) with a cheerful “She’ll be right, mate.” So why were they in such a flurry at the prospect of a “training and mentoring program for community organisers”, a “powerful narrative about the global importance of the Galilee Basin”, and a “large number of different voices combining together into a beautiful symphony”?

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/june/1370181600/bill-mckibben

 

I will add here that this problem is not limited to the coal produced in Australia:


 

List of countries by coal production
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a list of countries by coal production in 2011, based mostly on the Statistical Review of World Energy published in 2012 by British Petroleum,[1] ranking nations with coal production larger than 4 millions tonnes. Shares are based on data expressed in tonnes oil equivalent.

 

Australia comes at number 5 after China, the United States, India and the European Union...

 

 

 

 

warming the benches of the opposition...

Why did Oakeshott think it necessary? "I thought it was important to get everyone on the record. Some of the Coalition members run around the country playing to an audience of conspiracy theorists and deniers."
The record does show that about a quarter of the Coalition's federal MPs have, at some point, expressed disbelief or outright denial that man-made climate change is real. Among them is Tony Abbott, who, before becoming Opposition Leader, said he was "hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change", and famously called it "absolute crap".
The proportion of scientific papers published on the subject that reject the man-made origins of climate change is, however, far smaller than the proportion of sceptics on the Coalition benches.
Of about 12,000 scientific papers published worldwide in the 20 years to 2011, only 1.9 per cent did, a survey last month by James Cook University showed, and 97 per cent argued that climate change was real and man-made.
But when the Oakeshott motion was put to the House, the sceptics were nowhere to be seen. No one spoke against it in the bright glare of full national scrutiny: "We accept the science, we accept the targets and we accept the need for a market mechanism; we just happen to clearly, absolutely, fundamentally disagree over the choice of those mechanisms," Coalition spokesman Greg Hunt said. Prime among them, the carbon tax.
And when it came to the vote, the motion was carried on the voices, without dissent. This is taken as a unanimous vote. It "positions the deniers and the conspiracy theorists where they should be - on the fringe," Oakeshott says.
The topic of what to do about climate change is returning to the centre of the agenda for the world's two biggest economies and biggest carbon emitters, the US and China. It's one of the half dozen top issues at their coming California summit.
The problem will not go away for the planet, even after the Australian election, even if some would prefer to ignore it, although it's probably too late for Kiribati.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/canary-isle-shows-climate-change-is-real-20130603-2nm5r.html#ixzz2VBupccrp

clean improvements...

The latest figures on clean energy shows that renewable sources now power almost 4 million Australian homes.

The report by the Clean Energy Council found that wind, hydro, solar and bioenergy now power 13.4 per cent of the nation's electricity market.

Hydro-electricity contributes more than half of the renewable share, but wind and solar power are both increasing.

Council policy director Russell Marsh says the cost of cleaner sources is becoming more competitive, and that is a key reason behind the growth.

"Renewable energy is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation and that's going to continue to fall over the coming decades and soon will be the cheapest form of electricity generation available to Australia," he said

The report also found that more than $4 billion was invested in renewable technology last year, driving growth in the sector.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/4-million-australian-homes-powered-by-renewable-energy/4733548

merde-och un-australian hypocritical climate cfcs crap...

...

Frankly this paper should not have passed peer-review, but was perhaps aided by publication in a physics rather than climate journal, and in fact in the physics journal with the lowest impact factor by a wide margin.  The paper was then trumpeted by a University of Waterloo press release and a Science Daily article, both of which used exaggerated language like "Lu’s theory has been confirmed."  The Science Daily article did not discuss any of the problems with the paper that we have detailed in this post, or ask any climate experts about it.

ABC did a better job, talking to climate scientist David Karoly, who expressed appropriate skepticism about a paper which purports to overturn decades and even centuries of well-established physics and climate science in one fell swoop.  Characteristically, The Australian then criticized ABC for failing to be "fair and balanced" because they interviewed an actual climate expert about the paper.

Frankly, the paper is a non-story.  It may seem like news due to the grandiose claims of overturning the vast body of scientific evidence supporting CO2-caused global warming, but it is very rare for a single paper to accomplish this type of feat.  More often the single paper claiming to overturn the body of established scientific research is wrong.  That is clearly the case for Lu (2013), which is based on assuming rather than proving the hypothesis, unphysical curve fitting, and misrepresenting the cited research.

Moreover, this study isn't new.  It's actually the third Lu has published about his CFC warming hypothesis.  The first two were addressed by RealClimate, two peer-reviewed published responses, Skeptical Science, and others.  Andrew Gilkson at The Conversation, Climate Science Watch and Rabbett Run (here and here) are also good resources for debunking Lu's latest effort.

As we've previously discussed, the media need to be more careful in avoiding single study syndrome, misinforming the public by overhyping a single supposedly game-changing study before it has survived the scrutiny of the scientific community.

Note: this post has been incorporated into the rebuttals to the myth "it's CFCs"

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/environment/dont-believe-the-australian-cfcs-are-not-responsible-for-global-warming/

unprecedented flood levels...

Hungarians have been warned to prepare for their country's worst floods ever as the Danube is set to reach record levels this weekend.

"We are facing the worst floods of all time," said PM Viktor Orban.

Europe's second longest river is set to hit unprecedented levels in the capital Budapest in the next few days.

A state of emergency has been declared, and thousands of volunteers worked overnight to reinforce the banks of the swelling river.

Water levels are set to reach reach 8.85m (29ft), some 25cm (10in) higher than the Danube's previous record high in 2006.

Emergency workers have set up camps along the river as residents packed sandbags around their homes amid an atmosphere of concerned expectation, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22811172

Time is running out to minimise the next damage done by global warming... See story at top.