Those refugees on the beach are rich white folks, folks.
I spoke to University of Melbourne scientist Linden Ashcroft PhD for an overview. This event seems historic to me, and I suspect I will have several more vids on this.
Month: January 2020
New Research: Ocean Warming Faster than Thought, and Accelerating
Significant new research from Lijing Cheng and Kevin Trenberth.
Your intrepid reporter, of course, spoke to the scientists in December, above, and below.
The new study, the first to analyze ocean temperatures for 2019, was based on two independent data sets and used a new way of filling data gaps to measure ocean temperatures going back to the 1950s.
When the scientists compared ocean temperature data from the last three decades (1987-2019) to the three decades before that (1955-1986), they found the rate of warming had increased 450 percent, “reflecting a major increase in the rate of global climate change.”
Measured by a common energy unit used in physics, the oceans absorbed 228 sextillion joules of heat in the past 25 years. That’s equivalent to adding the energy of 3.6 billion Hiroshima-size atom bomb explosions to the oceans, said the study’s lead author, Lijing Cheng, with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics.
It’s “irrefutable proof of global warming” that leaves no other explanation aside from the effects of human-caused heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution, Cheng said.
Continue reading “New Research: Ocean Warming Faster than Thought, and Accelerating”The warming of the oceans has widespread effects. It causes marine heat waves that kill fish and coral reefs, fuels hurricanes and coastal downpours, spawns harmful toxin-producing algal blooms and also contributes to heat waves on land, said study co-author Kevin Trenberth, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
He linked the rising ocean heat content with ocean heat waves like the 2013 to 2015 “warm blob” in the Northeastern Pacific that resulted in a major loss of marine life, including a crash in cod populations.
“The ocean heat content changes are the primary memory of global warming,” he said. “This manifestation of global warming has major consequences.”
Victoria Falls Shrunk to a Trickle
This is a month old already. I had no idea.
NASA: The Hottest Decade
The past decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, driven by an acceleration of temperature increases in the past five years, according to data released Wednesday.
The findings, released jointly by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, detail a troubling trajectory: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, trailing only 2016. The past five years each rank among the five hottest since record-keeping began. And 19 of the hottest 20 years have occurred during the past two decades.
The warming trend also bears the unmistakable sign of human activity, which emits tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, scientists say.
“No individual hot year — or hot day or hot season, for that matter — is by itself evidence for climate change. But this hot year is just one of many hot years in this decade,” said Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA and Columbia University. “The planet is statistically, detectably warmer than before the Industrial Revolution. We know why. We know what it means. And we can do something about it.”
Continue reading “NASA: The Hottest Decade”According to NOAA, global warming has sped up over the past 40 years compared to earlier in the 20th century. The annual global average surface temperature is now increasing at an average rate of about 0.18 degrees Celsius (0.32 Fahrenheit) per decade.
That trend has shown few signs of changing. “Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the decade previously — and not by a small amount,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature data, told reporters Wednesday.
Choking Smoke disrupt Australian Tennis Open
The Weekend Wonk: Controlling Fire with Indigenous Knowledge
If this is the way it’s going, we’re going to have to get a lot better managing fire.
We might want to talk to some experts – indigenous people the world round have been doing this for a long time, – but one might argue that the peculiarly harsh conditions in Australia might have fostered some of the most carefully studied techniques.
A quick search shows that there is quite a bit of material on Indigenous fire management on youtube. Here’s a selection.
On a hot, dry day in March 2018, 20 separate wildfires ignited across the Bega Valley in New South Wales.
One fire that began at Reedy Swamp north of the town of Bega tore through close to 1,000 hectares before reaching the beachside township of Tathra.
Six months on, a forest of bare, blackened trees frames the town, where more than 100 homes were destroyed or damaged.
But on a small patch of bushland on the south-western edge of Tathra, a patch of green shows where the fire came to a halt.
The land is part of 71 hectares owned by the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) at Tathra West.
The title to the land was transferred in 2016, 17 years after it was granted to the Bega LALC under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act process.
In 2017, the Bega LALC began a cultural burning program as part of the management strategy for their landholdings.
With training and support from the Far South Coast Rural Fire Service (RFS) and local RFS volunteers, the cultural burn crew prepared and burnt 3.5 hectares of land at Tathra West using methods informed by traditional knowledge.
Six months on from the 2018 wildfire, the land where cultural burns were undertaken in 2017 is sprouting with native grasses, in stark contrast to the scorched trees and dense bracken that mark the surrounding landscape.
Climate Catastrophe Animal Vid of the Week – Koala Detecting Dog
Above, Koala sniffing dog.
Below, rescuers and fire-singed koalas.
In a Catastrophe, Aussie PM and Climate Deniers in Spotlight
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been under fire, – first for taking a Hawaiin vacation as the current bush-fire catastrophe set in – and more broadly for his staunch climate denial positions.
Great ABC reporting here. Evolving story.
Aussie Fire Gains Strength, Size. More Evacuations ordered..
Trying to work on a video about this fire and I can’t keep up.
A pair of massive bushfires in southeastern Australia has merged into a “megafire” engulfing some 2,300 square miles — a single blaze more than three times as large as any known fire in California.
The merged fire, which straddles the country’s most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria, measures nearly 1.5 million acres, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. It is just one of some 135 bushfires in Australia’s southeast that have claimed the lives of at least 26 people, killed more than a billion animals and damaged or destroyed nearly 3,000 homes.
Since September, the unprecedented bushfires have swept through an area larger than Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined.
NASA has released an animation showing how smoke from the fires has reached the lower stratosphere and traveled as far away as Chile.
(see above)
Murdoch Media in Australia – “Evil Greens started bush fires.”
The same folks that brought you “..the Sandy Hook parents faked their own children’s deaths,..” – now bringing you “evil greenies lighting fires in Australian bush to make coal look bad.”
As unusually intense and widespread bushfires have ravaged a drought-ridden Australia, bots and trolls have begun pushing climate science denial across the internet in the form of conspiracy theories about the fires. Thanks to climate change, exceptionally hot, dry drought conditions have worsened and lengthened Australia’s typical fire season.
Two of the main conspiracies about the fires are based on the false ideas that they are caused by a spate of arson and they have been worsened by the Green Party’s supposed efforts to stop controlled burns as a fire management and reduction measure.
Dr. Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) did an analysis of the online activity and concluded there was a high level of bots involved in spreading these conspiracies. As ZDnet reported, Graham is “at least confident” that that this was some type of disinformation campaign.
Sites like NewsWars — which was founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who falsely claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — are already pushing these conspiracies.
Notorious climate deniers Patrick Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute promoted the same conspiracies in the Washington Examiner. And the discredited extremist science denier Lord Monckton also weighed in.However, it isn’t just fringe sites pushing these ideas. The New York Times reports that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has also been instrumental in publishing these debunked claims (and others claiming that these fires are no worse than normal).
Continue reading “Murdoch Media in Australia – “Evil Greens started bush fires.””Despite multiple sources clearly discrediting these myths, CNN’s top story in its World News section today, which is also featured in its website’s top stories banner this morning, included the misleading headline, “Police in Australia are accusing 24 people of deliberately setting bushfires” — reinforcing the work of conspiracy theorists’ messaging.