Climate change is here despite denial

Anonymous memoir:

First the Pacific Islands & Maldives were inundated but I didn't worry because they were low lying anyway. New Orleans was vanquished by hurricanes but they have always had storms. Then there were droughts and food and water shortages in Africa exacerbating conflict and displacing people. But Africa had always been dry. The Philippines had a mega typhoon, but it was typhoon season. There were extreme heat waves & fires in Australia, but it's always been hot, and we have always had fires. I turned up the air conditioner and watched the tennis plasma TV. Then sea levels started rising and there were long fire seasons and whole towns burned. Infrastructure & the economy began to crumble. There were food & water shortages

Climate Change is happening around me now. Wish something had been done years ago.

Seems it never rains in Southern California. But California Dreamin' has become a California Dryin' nightmare and many are praying for the drought to end.

California has hit its driest point in 500 years. With rainfall of 7.38 inches state-wide which is 13 to15 inches below average and 2.42 inches below the previous driest year in 1898. If figures don't arrest your attention perhaps pictures will. But although California has historically been vulnerable to drought throw CO2 (emissions from burning fossil fuels) into the mix and 'Laid Back California' may be heading for a super stressful mega drought. Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency. "We do not know how much our current problem derives from the build up of heat trapping gasses but we can take it as a warning of things to come." In other words a red flag, warning sign, canary in the mine, portent for the future, of the impact of human-induced climate change. Australia should heed the warning.

The IPCC (U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicted in report after report that weather patterns would intensify and extreme weather events would become increasingly common. Now with the release of its 5^th report its message is becoming more shrill and unequivocal, but who is really listening?

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, was reported as saying "it was for governments to take action based on the science produced by the panel, consisting of thousands of pages of detail, drawing on the work of more than 800 scientists and hundreds of scientific papers".

I am not a climate scientist so I can appreciate the pithy distillation of the evidence, (that is happening before our eyes) conveyed by Rajendra Pachauri.

The evidence is incontrovertible. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, sea levels have risen, glaciers and arctic ice are rapidly melting, the concentration of greenhouse gases has risen.

In Australia we are also experiencing the impact of warming. Australia had its hottest year on record in 2013 a pattern ominously intensifying in 2014. Long heat waves extreme fire danger and a lengthening fire season, are all part of the new normal.

While some Australians are alarmed at climate change inaction, few seem to understand that it is not a thing that will occur in the long distant future, but a calamity that is already upon us. Still fewer seem to recognize that it is not static or something that we can decide to turn off if things get really bad. If we do nothing to curb emissions the earth's temperature will rise inexorably to an untenable 4 degrees by the end of the century.

But it could continue on beyond this, because of feedback loops already in train that cannot be arrested or reversed, once they have taken hold. These are the tipping points that Al Gore referred to in his ground breaking wakeup call of 2005, An Inconvenient Truth. Since the time that this film was made there has been some variation noted in the predictions but the basic premise is substantiated. In fact IPCC predictions have been conservative and have underestimated climate change. But a 4 degrees warmer Australia would be damn well unbearable, if not impossible.

For a brief time in Australia we seemed to be heeding the warnings.

In 2007 Kevin Rudd was elected on a promise to tackle the "greatest moral challenge of our generation" - climate change - saying that "we should be at a stage now in this country where climate change is beyond politics." But by 2013 the electorate seemed to go cold on action to avert climate catastrophe despite increased warming. This was aided and abetted by an unscrupulous campaign by big mining interests and the coalition and Rupert Murdoch's media. Abbott gained government by flogging doubt, especially regarding the carbon tax.

Now Australia is in the clutches of arch climate denier, Tony "climate change is absolute crap" Abbott. Just when we need strong global action to at least have a chance to mitigate climate change and its impact, the issue has become as politicized as the stop the boats mantra-driven war against refugees. Instead of a war against our true foe (if we continue with this militaristic metaphor) we are battling demons created in our minds by propaganda, not the real dangers. In a year (2013) that has been Australia's hottest on record we now have elected a government that will take us backwards in tackling the problem of climate change.

Prince Charles has described climate sceptics and deniers as "the headless chicken brigade".We know that Abbott loves the monarchy but it seems the heir to the British throne is just not that in to you Tony.

Dear fellow Australians, it seems our prime minister is a headless chook!

The Abbott Government is not just passively asleep at the wheel. It is driving us dangerously headlong into an inferno. Despite fire, storms and drought Abbott and Environment Minister Greg Hunt, have moved relentlessly forward in their back to front policies that increase emissions. These are in train and include:

1. Approval of extensive mining and coal and huge ports
2. Approval of dredging and dumping on the Great Barrier Reef
3. Moves to strip world heritage listing from Tasmanian forests
4. Exemption of laws protecting threatened species to enable great white shark cull in Western Australia
5. Bills to repeal carbon tax and mining tax
6. Scrapping of climate change advice agencies
7. Appointment of avowed climate denier Maurice Newman to chair the government business advisory council.

Breaking news: Barnaby Joyce climate change denier and Federal Agriculture Minister is touring drought stricken Queensland and has said "the drought is getting worse and worse ..something has to be done " - pardon me while I scoff.

Old News: Declaring himself a non-believer - as though comprehension of scientific reality was akin to religious zeal - South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi declared, in 2009."we have rain we have crops, the earth is not melting" while former leader of the opposition in the Senate, Nick Minchin, objected to policies "that frankly terrify 12-year-old children, by saying the planet is going to melt".

With friends like these, who needs a science minister?

Gay Alcorn Fairfax columnist asks what do you do when a democratically elected government is doing the wrong thing? Is waiting (and hoping) for the next election enough?

Meanwhile there are:

• Prolonged drought and heatwaves in Queensland
• Fires and heatwaves in Victoria and South Australia
• Fire emergencies in three states in mid January
• Major weather extremes around the world have become the new normal.

I was feeling low about the mounting evidence of global warming and of political inaction, so I asked a friend on the IPCC. Is there any hope? He replied that 'when the crunch comes and the crisis is imminent the human race in the past has risen to the occasion…. An example being, the last world war.'

So how bad does it have to get?

Experts and activists such as James Hansen, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein are now saying there will need to be mass civil disobedience to bring about massive divestment and to keep coal in the ground.

Klein says the word is (non-violent) resistance on multiple fronts. It's time because time is running out, for our children and grandchildren to inherit a habitable earth.