This was first published 5 Sep 2013 

An open letter to Bridget Abbott, Frances Abbott and (Louise Abbott)...

Dear Bridget, Frances and (Louise) Abbott... (Louise does not appear in the pictures, possible because she is under-aged or rebellious, unlike the other two sisters. I don't know.)

On a day like today (26 degrees Celsius in Sydney — 6 degrees Celsius above monthly average, and 7.3 degrees Celsius above the average for the 5th of September) I would not blame you if you felt it would be better to lie on the sand at Whale Beach rather than go with dad, but no matter what, you should still take note of Uncle Gus...

When you are Mrs Bridget Minchin, Mrs Frances Heffernan and Mrs Louise Abetz — grandmothers to two and a half kids each — it will be time to reflect and come clean about "the climate". 

But you may not... One good soul would argue that I should not involve you in this, BUT YOU HAVE chosen to INVOLVE YOURSELVES in your dad's distressful and distasteful business, so I have no choice but to tell you about the warming planet.

Like many ignorant Liberals (CONservatives) idiots, 50 years from now, you may have built a moat around your comforts in your little head, to avoid any demanding introspection such as asking questions that are a pathway to unhappiness and distress about whatever you are doing or have done.

Actually it is time to reflect today, but the euphoria of your dad becoming prime Minister of this fair country would be overwhelming and intoxicating like summer wine... 

Take note: Your dad is not a lovely dag but a dangerous idiotic dork.

And like the kids and grand-kids of Himmler, Goebbels, Georing and other Nazi officials, you will be ashamed of your dad — or should be... — and of having been part of his advancement towards his stupid grand plans, akin to those of the most despicable despots.

50 years from now, you would be grand-mothers and would have to confess to your grand-kids that your dad's non-belief in global warming was a total crock... And that unfortunately you were part of it... But you might still argue that his solution to this problem he did not believe in, was as good as any others. Not on your Nelly. Not true... Thus in your heart, if you have any, you would have to feel the heat — the relentless heat of winters like summers... and of summers like hell. But you may not, because your air conditioning unit would be working its butt off, in your bunker...

This is what's in store, REALLY HOT. Up to 15 degrees Celsius warmer than today. Year round, by 2250. Not far, considering that Shakespeare lived about 400 years back.

GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT A FALLACY and it's much faster than scientists are telling us... We are on the way to extremes and to devastation due to climatic conditions relentlessly changing from bad to worse and to warmer — as more CO2 is released into the atmosphere by HUMANS burning fossil fuels. I beg you on my knees to understand this reality.

The future of your grand children is not in your dad's hands, now. That future is in yours and if you don't understand now what Gus means (Gus will be long dead by then), I hope you do, preferably in the near future and start to fight your dad for what he is — a real danger to this planet.

Realise that many people will die from "global warming" whether you believe in it or not... Far more people will die than Hitler, Hirohito or the Americans ever killed, with their massive armies...

This is not a joke.

Your call.

Note: I would not write this letter if you did not parade like peahens either side of this dangerous man that, by chance of genetics, happens to be your dad.

Here’s something that wasn’t supposed to happen in this era of climate change consciousness: fossil fuel use is rising—soaring, in fact.

Oil prices are up as demand surges, and so oil companies are accelerating new exploration. As we all know, the fracking revolution, which has had to overcome heavy political opposition, has turned the United States into its own Saudi Arabia, erasing what was once quaintly known as the “energy crisis.” 

In the meantime, oil company profits are up, and so are their stock prices; investors are, in a word, pumped. As a CNBC headline blared on May 9: “Wall Street is back on the oil bandwagon.” The article quoted one CEO as saying: “The demand growth is soaking up the excess supply. People weren’t expecting the demand growth to be so robust.”

Yet while demand for oil has indeed been robust, the fact is that demand over the last half century has never stopped growing. And it’s expected to continue rising steadily for the foreseeable future.

By the way, the same is true of other fossil fuels. Natural gas consumption is up, too. Even worldwide annual coal consumption, while down in the last few years, is more than double what it was two decades ago.

So what’s going on? If we’re supposed to be transcending fossil fuels, as many experts say we must do for the sake of the climate, then why are we burning more of them than ever before? 

The answer is that we suffer from a kind of global cognitive dissonance. The political-media-chattering complex is in a bubble of its own making, telling itself what it wants to hear. Out in the real world, where energy is needed to make the planet’s economy hum, the situation is different. 

We might consider, too, the case of property owners in coastal areas who are voting with their own money. Many experts insist that Miami—and indeed much of Florida—will soon be inundated by rising sea levels, and yet the locals, living their lives, don’t seem so concerned.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-fossil-fuel-boom/

The sooner we crash, the sooner we...  what was it again? Have a face lift in a retirement village? Read from top. Is this designed to prop up the Russian economy?...

Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) is a hugely influential policy group filled with heavy hitters from politics and the oil industry. While the center's home page describes it as “an independent, interdisciplinary, and nonpartisan platform,” its track record shows that CGEP consistently supports the same policies favored by the fossil fuel industry. 

And one of its latest moves — hiring former Trump energy advisor and fossil fuel defender George “David” Banks as an expert on “international climate policy” — shows that trend will continue.

Under Trump, Banks served as White House Special Assistant for International Energy and Environment, which included publicly representing the administration at international climate change negotiations. At last November's United Nations climate talks in Bonn, Germany, that meant moderating the U.S.'s lone event, a controversial panel promoting coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy — and defending President Trump's infamous “climate change is a Chinese hoax” tweet.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/05/22/columbia-university-trump-george-d...

Every time I go to the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival I’m asked the same question: since there’s no policy issue more important than responding to global warming, and we’re doing so little about it, why do I ever write about anything else?

I give the obvious answer. Though I readily agree that climate change is the most pressing economic problem we face, if I banged on about nothing but global warming three times a week, our readers would soon lose interest.

But even as I make my excuses, my Salvo-trained conscience tells me they’re not good enough. Even if I can’t write about it every week, I should raise it more often than I do.

I’m still combing through the budget’s fine print, but I’ve yet to remark that its thousands of pages make almost no mention of climate change.

Even the federal government’s latest, 2015 “intergenerational report” peering out to 2055, devotes only a few paragraphs to “environment” and avoids using words starting with c.

I fear that history won’t be kind to the present generation – and particularly not to people with a pulpit like mine.

We’ve known of the scientific evidence for human-caused global warming since the late-1980s. Since then the evidence has only strengthened. And by now we have the evidence of our own senses of hotter summers and autumns and warmer winters, plus more frequent extreme weather events.

And yet as a nation we procrastinate. Our scientists get ever more alarmed by the limited time we have left to get on top of the problem, and yet psychologists tell us that the harder the scientists strive to stir us to action, the more we turn off.

Our grandchildren will find it hard to believe we could have been so short-sighted as to delay moving from having to dig our energy out of the ground to merely harnessing the infinite supply of solar and wind power being sent to our planet free of charge.

What were we thinking? Did an earlier generation delay moving from the horse and buggy to the motor car because of the disruption it would cause to the horse industry?

The biggest mistake we’ve made is to allow our politicians to turn concern about global warming into a party-political issue, and do so merely for their own short-term advantage.

The initial motives may have been short term, but the adverse effects have been lasting. These days, for a Liberal voter to worry about climate change is to be disloyal to their party and give comfort to the enemy.

Apparently, only socialists think their grandkids will have anything to worry about. The right-thinkers among us know the only bad thing our offspring will inherit is Labor’s debt.

Global warming used not to be, shouldn’t be and doesn’t have to stay a right-versus-left issue. In Europe it’s bipartisan. Margaret Thatcher was a vocal fighter for action on climate change, and the Conservative Party is anti-denial to this day.

If you remember, John Howard went to the 2007 election promising an emissions trading scheme. The big debate in that campaign was whether Labor’s rival plan was better because it started a year earlier.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-biggest-mistake-we-ve-made-o...

Read from top.

See also: the truth is a small candle in a hurricane of lies... 

Two very different news items on climate change have emerged in recent weeks, one a source of pessimism, the other a source of optimism.

First, the pessimism: a May 30 report from Greenpeace headlined “Dramatic surge in China carbon emissions signals climate danger.” The document declares: 

Led by increased demand for coal, oil and gas, China’s CO2 emissions for the first three months of 2018 were 4% higher than they were for the same period in 2017…. Analysts have suggested the country’s carbon emissions could rise this year by 5%—the largest annual increase in seven years.

Second, the optimism: a June 7 report from National Geographic headlined “This Gasoline Is Made of Carbon Sucked From the Air.” In the words of that story:

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, is already making a liquid fuel by sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere and combining it with hydrogen from water. This is an engineering breakthrough on two fronts: A potentially cost-effective way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere to fight climate change and a potentially cost-competitive way to make gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel that doesn’t add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere.

We might emphasize that the second story is not a satire from The Onion, but rather a real report, backed up by a peer-reviewed journal, that’s gained respectful attention in tech-minded periodicals. 

Yet interestingly, despite the media’s enormous—some would say relentless—focus on climate change, neither of these items have gained much traction. 

And why is that? Perhaps it’s because neither story fits the mainstream media’s preferred narrative these days. That narrative insists that the road to success on climate change runs through Washington, D.C., which means rolling over—and thoroughly stomping on—Donald Trump and his administration. In such a context, any climate change story that doesn’t involve piling the blame on Trump isn’t of interest to the media gatekeepers.

Returning to the Greenpeace item, the one offering a bleak assessment of China’s CO2, we can observe that neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post—nor any other mainstream media news outlet that this writer could find, save one story in the Financial Times—has touched it. 

Still, some might ask: could this blackout simply be a gauge of Greenpeace’s credibility in the eyes of the MSM? Actually, probably not, because just in the last few weeks, the media has cited many other Greenpeace reports concerning everything from orangutans to renewable garbage to oceanic plastics. 

So it’s more likely that untoward news about China and CO2 gets the spike because it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative—everyone knows that the real villain is Trump and his Republican enablers.

Since in this dramaturgy Trump is the bad guy, China must be the good guy. Indeed, ever since his appearance at the World Economic Forum in January 2017, China’s leader-for-life, Xi Jinping, has typically been cast as the valiant defender of the international order, including its Davos-friendly, politically correct environmentalism. 

And on the international proscenium, China’s promises tend to taken at face value; hence this New York Times headline from December: “China Unveils an Ambitious Plan to Curb Climate Change Emissions.” See? It says right here, in this official Beijing document—the Chinese are on it.

To be sure, China is big into solar power, but then, these days, China is big into everything. Notably, the People’s Republic seems focused on selling solar panels to the West, and who can blame them? It’s one more market for them to conquer. 

And yet every now and then a contrary indicator peeps through. For instance, there was this New York Times headline from January, which confirms the gist of the Greenpeace item: “China’s Emissions: More Than U.S. Plus Europe, and Still Rising.” As the story details, “Much of the extra demand was met by burning more coal, a particularly dirty fuel. Oil use has also risen as China has become the world’s largest car market, and so has natural gas consumption.” So we can see: the Chinese are saying one thing and burning another. Such double-dealing is a phenomenon not unheard of in world affairs, and yet it certainly blows off China’s green halo.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/on-climate-and-china-lib...

Note that the "gasoline made from the atmosphere" is a very slow process that is not coming near competing against the present anthropogenic output of CO2, even if this process was industrialised on a massive scale. So far the experiment represents the removal of CO2 equivalent to about planting one tree that will grow to full size in about 40 years. CO2 is a very hard molecule to break up.

History was made in the Middle East on June 28 when the world's hottest night on record was set in Quriyat, Oman with the overnight "low" dropping to 42.6 degrees Celsius. 

Oman's hot night is just one of many temperature records to be smashed in the past few weeks.

Individual location records have been broken in the US, Russia, Canada, Scotland, Armenia and Georgia.

Africa could have reached its highest ever reliably recorded temperature of 51.3C in Ourargla, Algeria on July 5.

The World Meteorological Organisation recognises 55C as the highest temperature for Africa, recorded at Kebili, Tunisia on July 7, 1931.

But there is widespread scepticism about the record's accuracy because the temperatures recorded before the 1950s are mysteriously higher than anything to have come after them.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-19/nights-getting-hotter-climate-chan...

Read from top.

The year 2018 is on track to be the fourth warmest on record, beaten only by 2016, 2015 and 2017. In other words, we have had the warmest four-year run since we started measuring. According to data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), June 2018 is the 402nd consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average. The UK’s Environmental Audit Committee has warned that we could see summer temperatures reaching 38C by the 2040s, leading to a potential 7,000 heat-related deaths a year.

One hot summer does not a changing climate make, but the trend in the global data is now irrefutable. When Michael Mann published the “hockey stick” graph back in 1998, there was vociferous public pushback, yet the observed temperature rises match what Mann had predicted. Today’s hockey stick graph isn’t a forward projection but a historical record. The world has been getting hotter, and it will continue to do so. The only question now is how much hotter it gets.

The mechanisms behind this are not difficult to understand. Over a period of millions of years, carbon became trapped in deposits under the Earth’s crust, as coal, oil and natural gas. As the great engines of industrialisation came online across the planet, humanity developed an insatiable hunger for this trapped carbon. Burning it powered the machines that drove economic growth and development, which in turn raised the demand for more machines and more carbon. Carbon that took millions of years to trap has been released into the atmosphere at a rate that is, in geological terms, almost instantaneous.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/31/climate-change-den...