Among prime ministers’ legacies are the lasting images they leave – the moments of triumph, of humanity, of loss, of leadership.

For Scott Morrison, Australia’s 30th prime minister, the myriad baseball caps/thumbs/beers/pies/balls photographs generically blur, none individually memorable.

Instead, he is on track to be remembered for the indelible sight of proffering a lump of coal to federal Parliament.

If the stunt fits …

The gallery photographers captured the image, the symbolism, for whatever final showreel Mr Morrison receives, but now the stunt has captured the prime minister.

Ignoring the potential circuit-breaker of the drought and bushfires to exert leadership over the coalition’s fossil-fuel-owned rump and grab a carbon policy in keeping with most Australians’ wishes, Mr Morrison has doubled down in defence of his precious coal.

In the process, he has caught himself up in his own carbon spin cycle.

The Trump template of telling lies and sticking with them in the face of facts demonstrably works for the faithful.

Climate deniers, like anti-vaxxers, are reinforced by the sound of their own opinions.

Those with immediate financial incentives – their jobs, their funding, their investments, their political donations – may want to believe what is most comfortable.

But the repeated spin becomes entrapment as those in the pragmatic middle ground – those who decide who wins government – physically sense the climate is undeniably changing for the worse.

All the stunts in Mr Morrison’s repertoire eventually can’t distract from the insurers, the regulators, the central banks and financiers spelling out the obvious: The scientists are right, the fossil-fuel apologists are wrong.

The evidence of our own lived experience accumulates.

The reaction to Mr Morrison’s effective “we’re doing what we can but there’s nothing we can do about it” claim last week showed it’s not washing.

Particularly, his line that “we’re only 1.3 per cent of global emissions so we have no impact” has been trotted out and shot down so often as to be useless.

Cue the now-usual ripostes – we were only a small proportion of allied forces, so we had no impact in war; as a taxpayer, I’m only a tiny proportion of total revenue so there’s no need for me to pay.

The other key lie, “I am up for taking action on it, not just jabbering on about it”, is destroyed in two graphs.

The only way the government can try to claim the billions it’s blowing on  “direct action” are achieving something is by cherry-picking the per capita CO2 emissions figure, as the Department of Environment and Energy dutifully highlights in its quarterly national greenhouse accounts.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/11/25/carbon-scott-morriso...

Picture at top by Gus Leonisky

See also: don't gamble the future — don't shit on the children...

Trees were uprooted and power was cut to 52,000 homes in less than 10 minutes after an intense burst of wild weather swept through Sydney this afternoon.

• An intense storm swept through Sydney just after 1pm 
• Power has been lost to at least 40,000 homes, according to Ausgrid
• The Bureau of Meteorology has issued warnings about large hailstones and gusty thunderstorms across the state

In Gordon and Killara, on the Upper North Shore, several leafy streets were transformed into danger zones of drooping power lines and smashed cars when the storm hit about 1pm.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) issued a severe thunderstorm warning for large chunks of NSW and said areas north of Sydney would be the worst-affected into the evening.

The NSW State Emergency Service (SES) said it had responded to about 1,200 calls for help in Sydney and the Blue Mountains.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-26/sydney-storm-brings-down-trees-cu...

Meanwhile the bushfires were still burning out of control and blanketed the city in a haze of smoke...

Pictures at top and above by Gus Leonisky.

AS NSW BRACES itself against the threat of further catastrophic bushfires across much of the State, it has been revealed that the Berejiklian Government made major cuts to the capital expenditure budgets of both Fire and Rescue NSW and the Rural Fire Service.

While different from the daily operating budgets of these services that pay for things such as firefighters' salaries, the capital expenditure budget is put toward the purchase of all manner of essential fire fighting equipment such as fire trucks, helicopter water bombers and support ambulances.

Under the 2019-20 NSW State Budget, Fire and Rescue had its capital expenditure budget cut by $28.5 million or 35 per cent. The Rural Fire Service has its capital expenditure budget cut by $49.9 million or 75 per cent.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/gladys-berejiklian-slas...

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The rainforests along the spine of the Great Dividing Range, between the Hunter River and southern Queensland, are remnants of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent that broke up about 180 million years ago.

"Listening to the dawn chorus in these forests is literally an acoustic window back in time," ecologist Mark Graham tells RN's Saturday Extra.

"It's like listening to what the world sounded like in the time of the dinosaurs."

The forests are mountaintop islands that have been "permanently wet" for tens of millions of years.

But now, these forests are being burnt for the first time.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-27/bushfires-devastate-ancient-fores...

Read from top. THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING beyond climate change....

Smoke... Picture by Gus leonisky.

When is an emergency really an emergency?

If you’re the captain of the Titanic, approaching a giant iceberg with the potential to sink your ship becomes an emergency only when you realise you might not have enough time to steer a safe course.

And so it is, says Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, when it comes to the climate emergency.

Knowing how long societies have to react to pull the brake on the Earth’s climate and then how long it will take for the ship to slow down is the difference between a climate emergency and a manageable problem.

Rather than being something abstract and open to interpretation, Schellnhuber says the climate emergency is something with clear and calculable risks that you could put into a formula. And so he wrote one.

Emergency = R × U = p × D × τ / T

In a comment article in the journal Nature, Schellnhuber and colleagues explained that to understand the climate emergency we needed to quantify the relationship between risk (R) and urgency (U).

Borrowing from the insurance industry, the scientists define risk (R) as the probability of something happening (p) multiplied by damage (D).

For example, how likely is it that sea levels will rise by a metre and how much damage will that cause.

Urgency (U) is the time it takes you to react to an issue (τ) “divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T)”, they wrote.

Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, tells Guardian Australia the work on the formula was just the “tip of a mathematical iceberg” in defining the climate emergency.

“It can be illustrated by the Titanic disaster, but it applies to many severe risks where you can calculate the do-nothing/business-as-usual probability of a highly damaging event,” he says. “Yet there are options to avoid the disaster.

“In other words, this a control problem.” 

There is a time lag between the rapid cuts to greenhouse gases and the climate system reacting. Knowing if you have enough time tells you if you’re in an emergency or not.

Schellnhuber used “standard risk analysis and control theory” to come up with the formula, and he was already putting numbers to it.

“As a matter of fact, the intervention time left for limiting global warming to less than 2C is about 30 [years] at best. The reaction time – time needed for full global decarbonisation - is at least 20 [years].”

As the scientists write in Nature, if the “reaction time is longer than the intervention time left” then “we have lost control”.

Schellnhuber says: “Beyond that critical point, only some sort of adaptation option is left, such as moving the Titanic passengers into rescue boats (if available).”

Earlier this month, Oxford Dictionaries announced “climate emergency” as the word of the year, defining it as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/01/scientists-theory-of...

According to Gus's own calculations (1994), some based on various gambling statistics, we should have reduced to zero CO2 emission in 1996. 

See also:

Stochastic refers to a randomly determined process.[1] The word first appeared in English to describe a mathematical object called a stochastic process, but now in mathematics the terms stochastic process and random process are considered interchangeable.[2][3][4][5][6] The word, with its current definition meaning random, came from German, but it originally came from Greek στόχος (stókhos), meaning 'aim, guess'.[1]

The term stochastic is used in many different fields, particularly where stochastic or random processes are used to represent systems or phenomena that seem to change in a random way. The term is used in the physical sciences such as  biology,[7]chemistry,[8] ecology,[9]  neuroscience,[10] and physics[11] as well as technology and engineering fields such as image processing, signal processing,[12] information theory,[13] computer science,[14] (including the field of artificial intelligence), cryptography[15] and telecommunications.[16] It is also used in finance, due to seemingly random changes in financial markets[17][18][19] as well as in medicine, linguistics, music, media, colour theory, botany, manufacturing, and geomorphology.

Stochastic social science theory is similar to systems theory.

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic

Note: according to Gus, global warming isn't a stochastic system, but weather events are part thereof, making weather predictions difficult. In the 1980s, we had the Chaos Theory which is one of the cousin of Stochastic...

Most of our politicians, including Scumbag Miracleson are idiots...

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At least one home and multiple buildings have been destroyed by an out-of-control bushfire near Batemans Bay on the New South Wales south coast.

Sydney, meanwhile, is ringed by bushfires, causing heavy smoke to linger.

Almost 120 bush and grass fires are burning across NSW, with almost half uncontained and more than 2,000 firefighters being supported by aircraft.

On Monday firefighters rallied to save homes on the south coast as fierce winds fanned a fast-moving fire which quadrupled in size in less than two days.

The out-of-control fire at Currowan is burning across almost 25,000 hectares and is being pushed east towards coastal communities. However, it tempered overnight as gusty north-easterly winds moderated.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/03/bushfires-rage-ac...

Read from top.

The smoke in Sydney has been relentless... We're starting to feel like being inside a trout-smokehouse in Weisbaden, Germany...

Experts are baffled by the cause of an exceptionally large volume of "cornflake seaweed" that has washed up on southern Gold Coast beaches in recent days.

• Experts say the seaweed will start to smell when it decays
• The seaweed could remain on the beach and in the ocean for up to one month
• The Gold Coast City Council has sent inspectors to the affected beaches

The seaweed is piled up to 1 metre deep in some locations, trapping runners and swimmers who have become stuck in the algae.

Seaweed farmer and marine plant authority, Doctor Pia Winberg, from University of Wollongong said the seaweed influx was an annual event but this year the sheer volume was much greater than previous years.

"It is very unusual that it would come up in such masses on the beach," she said.

"The weed will start to smell as it decays but the weed will eventually break down and feed the marine food chain including fish.

"Some of that organic matter can be composted to promote plant growth.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-04/gold-coast-beaches-seaweed-sludge...

More weird things are going to happen...

Read from top.

Fierce bushfires continue to encroach on homes in NSW, as thick smoke blankets Sydney again for the fourth day in a row.

• The Three Mile fire in the Hawkesbury has destroyed at least one property 
• Three emergency level fires are burning in Gospers Mountain, in the Wollemi National Park in the Lower Hunter, and in the nearby areas of Paterson and the Howes Valley
• Thick smoke continues to cover Sydney and surrounds

At least one property has been engulfed by the Three Mile fire in the Wisemans Ferry area on Sydney's northern outskirts, with other buildings under immediate threat.

Another three fires — one at Gospers Mountain and others at nearby at Paterson and the Howes Valley in the Lower Hunter — are burning at emergency level.

Firefighters are battling the Three Mile blaze on the north side of the Hawkesbury which continues to intensify.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-04/bushfires-threaten-homes-in-nsw-w...

Homes are under threat as several emergency-level bushfires burn west of Sydney and the Central Coast, blanketing the capital with thick smoke into the night.