THE CLIMATE COUNCIL welcomes Advance SA MP John Darley’s admission that he was wrong about climate change and had paid too much attention to sceptics who presented their opinions as facts.

Mr Darley told the South Australian parliament this week that it was “important that individuals recognise their failings as well as their achievements, and on the subject of climate change I have been very wrong.”

“The science of climate change has been long settled, but in Australia vested interests have sown doubt in some people’s minds. The Climate Council hopes that Mr Darley’s willingness to admit he was wrong will inspire others to listen to the science,” said the Climate Council’s CEO, Amanda McKenzie.

“Australia is one of the most vulnerable developed countries to climate change. This year we experienced our hottest summer on record with fruit cooking on trees in South Australia,” said Ms McKenzie.

“Year after year our Federal Government has failed to act on climate change and as a result our greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise,” she said.

“We are seeing political leadership on climate change in other parts of the world. The UK has just committed to ending its contribution to climate change by 2050. In that country, Conservatives and Labour have listened to science on climate change. It’s time all Australian politicians did the same,” she said.

Read more:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/its-never-too-late-to-admit-...

U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record – again

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July 9, 2019 Rain – and plenty of it – was the big weather story in June, adding to a record-breaking 12 months of precipitation for the contiguous U.S. It's the third consecutive time in 2019 (April, May and June) the past 12-month precipitation record has hit an all-time high.

Read more:

https://www.noaa.gov/news/us-has-its-wettest-12-months-on-record-again

Six tourists have been killed and at least 30 other people injured in a violent storm that swept across a region of northern Greece.

Gale-force winds, heavy rain and hailstorms lashed Halkidiki, near the city of Thessaloniki, late on Wednesday, officials say.

A Czech couple died when their caravan was blown away, and two Romanians and two Russians were also killed.

A state of emergency was declared and more than 100 rescue workers deployed.

Charalambos Steriadis, head of civil protection in northern Greece, described it as an "unprecedented phenomenon".

The storm followed a spell of very hot weather in Greece with temperatures soaring to 37C (98F) over the past two days.

Images and video posted on social media show trees toppled, cars overturned and buildings damaged.

Emily Kishtoo, from Surrey, was at a beach party with her family when the storm hit on Tuesday night. 

"It literally came out of nowhere," she told the BBC.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48945821

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A Finnish research duo has evaluated the human contribution to carbon dioxide increase as a meagre 0.01°C out of the last century's total increase of 0.1°C. Instead, clouds were named as the culprit behind climate change.

Climate change is not caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, but cloud formations, a study by Turku University researchers Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi has claimed.

In their paper, aptly titled “No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change”, the Finnish researchers conclude that global temperatures are “practically controlled” by the low cloud cover fraction, whereas “only a small part” of the increased carbon dioxide concentration is anthropogenic.

“During the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1°C because of carbon dioxide. The human contribution was about 0.01°C”, the Finnish researchers wrote.

According to the Finnish researchers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate sensitivity scale is “about one order of magnitude too high”, because a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing in climate models.

Despite the presence of monthly temperature anomalies described as “noisy”, the recurrence of decreasing periods in the increasing temperature trend cannot be explained by the monotonically increasing concentration of carbon dioxide and seems to go far beyond the accuracy of the present climate models, the Finnish researchers wrote.

“Because the anthropogenic portion in the increased carbon dioxide is less than 10 percent, we have practically no anthropogenic climate change”, the researchers concluded.

Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute (DTU Space) in Copenhagen, previously argued that the climate is controlled by the Sun's activity and cosmic radiation. Svensmark's theory is that cosmic rays' effect on cloud formation has an indirect cause on global warming.

This theory has recently won the support of Kobe University in Japan. After studying sediment from the Gobi desert, the researchers came to the conclusion that when galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth’s last geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger.

“New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an 'umbrella effect'”, the Japanese researchers suggested in their paper titled “Winter monsoons became stronger during geomagnetic reversal”.

Climate change, and its anthropogenic aspect, remains one of the most highly contested scientific issues, with a broad array of opinions and an extremely large degree of uncertainty in scientific literature. The smallest values estimated are very close to zero while the highest go as far as 9 degrees Celsius, with a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/environment/201907111076211867-study-sees-no-sol...

Waste of time arguing with these Finnish idiots unless they show their calculations, get these verified — and their head examined by a psychiatrist. The point is that cloud cover tends to actually cool the atmosphere below, by reflecting sunlight. As well the average increase of temperature on this planet has been about 1 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution. The 10 hottest recorded year average have been in the last couple of decades, with increasing atmospheric disturbances. More floods, more droughts, more storms and hail the size of small oranges in Switzerland.

"Because the anthropogenic portion in the increased carbon dioxide is less than 10 percent"?. This is pure bullshit. Presently, there is about 120 ppm of anthropogenic CO2 added to the natural maximum of 300 ppm for the last million years, during warm climates. This represents about 40 per cent EXTRA on this maximum — or 28.57 percent of the total present CO2 in the atmosphere. That we're not cooking yet is due to mitigating factors, such as the melting of the ice.

Glaciers and the poles are melting at a rate of knots, retarding the full-blown effects of global warming, and the IPCC computer models are designed to be somewhat too cautious in their calculations, and THEY DO INCLUDE ALL FACTORS, including cloud cover.

Henrik Svensmark is also bullshitting about the Sun — which has not done anything remarkable that would warm the atmosphere, beyond what is included in the IPCC models. High-energy particles from space AFFECT THE PLANET CONSTANTLY, meaning that they do not affect the changes of climate, except in negligible quantities, compared to CO2, methane and NOx gases. 

And I have news for the Kobe University in Japan: geomagnetic reversal is not about to happen, unless it happens tomorrow or in 5000 years. Increase in monsoon intensity ISN'T AN INDICATION of polar reversal.

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC driven by CO2 increase. Get this in your head before it's too late.

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Feeding People With Science

Plant Researchers Brace for Population Explosion

By 2050, the world will require nearly twice as much food as today. But producing it without consuming any extra resources -- so as not to exacerbate climate change -- will be tricky. Three scientists explain how this agricultural feat may be possible.

If the progress of the last 60 years had to be depicted in only four figures, this is what they would be: In 1960, global agriculture produced an average of 200 kilograms (around 400 pounds) of grain for each person on the planet. Today, it has risen to 400 kilograms. At the same time, the global population has risen from 3 to 7 billion.

These statistics reveal a miracle of sorts: Though the number of people on the planet has doubled in the past six decades, the amount of food per capita has also increased. The percentage of people around the world who are currently suffering from hunger, 11 percent, marks a record low. Never before in the history of humankind has our collective abundance been so high.

Thousands of scientists across the planet are working to turn the extraordinary into reality. They are pursuing new ideas and methods to conquer hunger once and for all in the 21st century. Whether or not they will succeed remains to be seen. Indeed, they face a tremendous challenge.

Read more:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/feeding-people-with-science-soon-the-world-will-require-twice-as-much-food-a-1276556.html

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Pope Francis is an equal opportunity offender.

No matter where you place yourself along the Catholic Church's broad spectrum – right, left or center; conservative or liberal; traditional or progressive – if you are not challenged and even disturbed by some of the things this pope says and does, then you are not paying attention.

And that includes any of you who may consider yourselves "Pope Francis groupies" or "my-pope-right-or-wrong" Catholics. If he is not getting just a little bit under your skin then you are not listening, either.

Despite what some of his more traditionalist critics claim, Francis is not politically correct. He is, in fact, quite out-spoken. He is prophetic.

That is because he is, without a doubt, one of the most radically evangelical popes the Church has ever seen. And his radical reading of the Gospel, like that of his sainted namesake from Assisi more than 800 year ago, calls into question and serves as a critique to all ideologies, life styles and ways of thinking.

It is well-known by now, that the 82-year-old pope's insistence that the world's affluent societies be more generous in welcoming and integrating migrants and refugees is causing an uproar among the residents of those societies.

Ironically, some of the fiercest opponents to Francis' take on immigration are immigrants themselves or, like the pope, children of immigrants.

And it is no secret that the Italian-Argentinian pope's criticism of unbridled capitalism and his call for a fairer distribution of the world's wealth and resources have rubbed many pro-capitalist Catholics the wrong way.

But believers who oppose Francis on these issues are not the only ones who find some of his teachings hard to accept.

This was confirmed recently in a message posted on Twitter by someone most people would consider a progressive Catholic.

"There are several parts of @Pontifex #LaudatoSi with which I vehemently disagree. One has to do with his stance on air conditioning," said this person, who also happens to be Catholic university professor of theology, ethics and the environment.

Laudato si' is, of course, the controversial encyclical "on the care of our common home," which Francis published four years ago. And the author of the tweet is actually enthusiastic about this 2014 document on issues relating to preservation of the environment and all God's creation (people included).

But, evidently, the pope's take on A/C is just a bit too much of a challenge to this professor's comfort zone.

"Air-conditioning in muggy climates is a gift from the heavens. Specifically, it dehumidifiers and cools the heavens, and that is a godsend," this "green" Catholic concluded.

Another progressive-minded Catholic chimed in:

"I do think that in some places it (A/C) is a life saving necessity because of excessive heat and because of allergies. That said, it does not have to be blasting everywhere at all times."

But what does our current Bishop of Rome actually say about the matter in his encyclical? He makes only one reference. It's found in paragraph 55 of the text.

And it seems to be a direct answer to our aforementioned Tweeters.

"People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning," the pope writes.

"The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand," he continues.

Francis comes to a somewhat different conclusion than that of his critics. "An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive," he says.

Yes, this seems like a hard teaching. But just stop and think: how in the world did we survive thousands of years before A/C was invented?

Even just 20 or so years ago, air-conditioning was not very common throughout most places in Italy, for example. And most people in this country are still ambivalent about using it today.

Unfortunately, that has more to do with the fear that re-circulated air is unhealthy, rather than its ill effects on the environment, which is why many Italians use AC with windows cracked open – to let in "fresh" or natural air!

Life without air-conditioning, even in hot places like Rome in July and August, is not impossible. It used to be the norm. There were age-old strategies to keep us from burning up, such as drawing the blinds and using a fan or two.

The pace of life (and work) slowed down considerably when there was no A/C. And people's appetites were curbed significantly. These were never considered bad things. In fact, the change of the daily rhythm was considered to be in tune with nature and a very healthy thing indeed.

But our ever-more consumerist society and the craze to produce more and more put little value on downtime.

Read more:

https://international.la-croix.com/news/francis-continues-to-make-us-all...

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There is a myth that's is doing the rounds again. The earth is getting closer to the sun and this will raise the temperature by whatever:

This is of course a lot of boloney. And this "Get a Straight Answer - ISTP - NASA" site has as much to do with NASA as dead monkeys in the African jungles. It's bullshit. The reality is a bit more precise:

On January 3rd, 2019, Earth reached the point in its orbit where it's at its closest approach to the Sun: perihelion. Every object orbiting a single mass (like our Sun) makes an ellipse, containing a point of closest approach that's unique to that particular orbit, known as periapsis. For the past 4.5 billion years, Earth has orbited the Sun in an ellipse, just like all the other planets orbiting their stars in all the other mature solar systems throughout the galaxy and Universe.

But there's something you may not expect or appreciate that nevertheless occurs: Earth's orbital path doesn't remain the same over time, but spirals outward. This year, 2019, our perihelion was 1.5 centimeters farther away than it was last year, which was more distant than the year before, etc. It's not just Earth, either; every planet drifts away from its parent star. Here's the science of why.

Read more:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/03/earth-is-driftin...

So, if you think that a couple of centimetres away or closer to the sun will freeze or burn your underpants, think again. Don't be stupid, please... 

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND ANTHROPOGENIC, DUE TO OUR BURNING OF FOSSIL FUELS and changing the planet natural balance — CREATING CO2 and other warming gases. 

Meanwhile we know that the sun will consume the earth in about 5 billion years. Happy lives till then... unless we muck it up before...

...

Oh, poop.

In Gowanus, Brooklyn, a single small, diaperless baby shut down an entire city swimming pool — plunging a large crowd of sweltering people into sweaty despair.

“What the f—? On the hottest day? They closed the pool?” fumed Suegeil Mercado, 43, who’d been waiting on line with her 6-year-old daughter.

The pool won’t reopen until Sunday at 11 a.m.

“Red Hook it is!” one dry-bathing-suited local exclaimed as he stormed off — to another pool.

Olivia Bensimon

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2019/07/20/new-yorkers-get-creative-to-beat-110-tempe...

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Here in Sydney, we're used to (no we're not) to hotter days for longer periods... The maximum experienced in my neck of the woods was 46.5 degrees Celsius (115.7 F), but temps nearing 49 (120+) and above are measured in the dry Aussie parts, like Marble Bar. I've experienced 50+ (122+) at Lake Disappointment... And these temps are IN THE SHADE.  On a steel plate in the sun, it takes two seconds to cook an egg...