https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ywB8132jc

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

In his missive to readers – Climate change: Why The Guardian is putting threat to Earth front and centre – Rusbridger announced his pending retirement and explained that after 20 years as editor he had few lasting regrets save this one: 

"... that we had not done justice to this huge, overshadowing, overwhelming issue of how climate change will probably, within the lifetime of our children, cause untold havoc and stress to our species."

For many years, environmentalists, the scientific community, and critics of the corporate and mainstream media have pointed out that newspapers and news television programs have done far too little in providing quality coverage and explanation of the slow-moving yet existential crisis posed by the warming of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans caused by the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases and carbon emissions.

Exploring at least the partial explanation for that shortcoming, Rusbridger writes:

There may be other extraordinary and significant things happening – but they may be occurring too slowly or invisibly for the impatient tick-tock of the newsroom or to snatch the attention of a harassed reader on the way to work ....

There may be untold catastrophes, famines, floods, droughts, wars, migrations and sufferings just around the corner. But that is futurology, not news, so it is not going to force itself on any front page any time soon.

Even when the overwhelming majority of scientists wave a big red flag in the air, they tend to be ignored. Is this new warning too similar to the last? Is it all too frightening to contemplate? Is a collective shrug of fatalism the only rational response?

The climate threat features very prominently on the home page of the Guardian on Friday even though nothing exceptional happened on this day. It will be there again next week and the week after. You will, I hope, be reading a lot about our climate over the coming weeks.

Read more: https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/on-climate-humanity-must-rise-up-against-collective-shrug-of-fatalism,7454

See also: 

Got a call from AGL the other day offering a 12 per cent discount on the electricity bill. The catch was that, if we had solar panels, we could forget about the 12 per cent; only a 7 per cent discount was on offer.

This was highly suspicious behaviour. You know something is wrong if you get a call, out of the blue, offering you an unsolicited discount on anything.

Electricity prices have run too high. Renewable energy is rapidly getting cheaper, more efficient, and power companies are desperately trying to lock in customers and stave off the incursion from renewables.

This phone call was merely one shot fired in the generational war between "old power" and "new power".

Deutsche Bank released a research report last month which predicted solar energy was well on its way to replacing conventional fuels as the major source of energy in the world, generating $5 trillion in revenue by 2030. That's $5000 billion.

At the moment, there are 130GW of solar installed; 1 per cent of the $2 trillion annual global electricity market.

There is a moderate chance a monsoon trough in the Coral Sea could develop into a cyclone.

The Bureau of Meteorology said there was a 20 to 50 per cent chance the trough, about 700 kilometres off Cape York, could strengthen on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Senior forecaster Peter Otto said the system was likely to stay north of the larger population centres of the state.

"It is in a favourable environment to develop into a tropical cyclone so we're watching that fairly closely," he said.

"It's not a certain thing to develop but it could be Tuesday or Wednesday moving towards the north coast of Queensland towards Wednesday or Thursday.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-09/chance-of-cyclone-forming-in-queensland/6289920

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According to some professional weather sites, there is a stronger chance (80 %) of such cyclone forming and becoming massive... Nonetheless, this cyclone would soon turn back and hit New Caledonia instead of Queensland... In the lap of the gods... 

Meanwhile at Ockham's Razor:

Frank Stacey: Current concern about the greenhouse effect and global warming prompts a consideration of the definition of the expression ‘greenhouse effect’. Although it has arisen as an analogy to the operation of a glass greenhouse, the analogy is imperfect. As applied to the atmospheric effect, it is the warming of the surface by sunlight and partial blocking of outgoing radiant heat by the opacity of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapour to thermal radiation. There is no physical barrier to air movement or to loss of heat by convection, as there is in a greenhouse, in which air temperature is controlled by vents. The mechanisms are different, but whether the loss of heat is inhibited by properties of the atmosphere or by a glass barrier, a necessary feature is heating of a surface by sunlight. I take this as basic to the definition and find it helpful in understanding what the greenhouse effect can, or cannot, do. It offers a test for the validity of arguments about greenhouse mediated global warming.

A hypothesis that has achieved some prominence, but fails to meet this feature of the definition, concerns the very high surface temperature of Venus, about 460 degrees Centigrade. The massive carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus invited the inference that this is a result of an extreme or ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect. There is an alarming but implausible implication that it is possible for the effect to be that strong. The cloud in the Venus atmosphere is very dense and prevents anything more than weak diffuse sunlight reaching the surface. There can be no greenhouse effect because the surface is not heated by sunlight. The high temperature has a different explanation. The atmosphere is stirred by vigorous winds, with the gas repeatedly compressed and decompressed by the vertical component of its motion. The temperature rises as it is compressed by moving downwards and is cooled by upward movement, establishing a temperature gradient similar to, but much stronger than, the gradient in the Earth’s atmosphere. The effect is very strong because the atmosphere is dense, with a surface pressure 90 times our atmospheric pressure. There is a radiation balance with sunlight at a level roughly coinciding with the cloud tops and the relationship between the temperature there and at the surface is simply a consequence of compression heating. There is no greenhouse effect.

Coming back down to Earth, the central question that is addressed in models of the atmosphere, and its interactions with sunlight and with the Earth and oceans, is this: What temperature rises must be expected for different assumptions about emissions of the greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide? The models generally assume an equilibrium state, that is, steady greenhouse gas concentrations and constant atmosphere and ocean temperatures. It would be easier to compare the models with the real Earth, if the Earth were in an equilibrium state, but that is far from the present situation. We are in a transient state of rapid change and I want to consider how different this is from an equilibrium state. The biggest differences are caused by the oceans. They are absorbing both heat and carbon dioxide, but are not keeping up with the atmospheric changes. The present imbalance between the energy received from the Sun and the energy radiated to space is about a quarter of one percent of the radiation that reaches the surface. It may sound like a small difference, but that difference amounts to a lot of energy and the imbalance cannot persist for long without dramatic consequences. But its magnitude is obscured to casual observation by the fact that at least 90% of it is absorbed by the oceans. Even the melting of glacial and polar ice is included in the other 10%.  The oceans are warming up, but their heat capacity is very large and the temperature lag, relative to equilibrium with the atmosphere, is more than 100 years. That is how long it will take to see the full effect, even of the greenhouse gases emitted so far...

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/we-live-in-a-greenhouse-with-no-vents/6277528

My personal belief is that the Venus atmosphere has a global warming component apart from "compression" and "decompression" of gases. Like on earth the higher altitudes may be quite warm due to solar heat (like the Thermosphere on Earth) which may not be so close to being a vacuum on Venus, also would be driving the "compression and decompression" vortexes. It would be a "global warming from the top" rather than from the hard surface of the planet at such temperatures. At 460 degrees Celsius, Water cannot be but steam, though Venusian atmosphere is mostly CO2. I could be wrong...

New York wants to get serious about solar power. The state has a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and it's already among the nation's solar leaders. New York ranks ninth overall for total installed solar, and in 2013 alone it added enough to power more than 10,000 homes.

While that's great news for solar companies and environmentalists, it's a bit of a problem for electric utilities. Until recently, the business model of electric companies hadn't changed much since it was created a century ago. (The country's first electric grid was strung up by Thomas Edison in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1880s, and some parts of it continued to operate into the 2000s.) Utilities have depended on a steady growth in demand to stay ahead of the massive investments required to build power plants and the electric grid. But now, that tradition is crumbling—thanks to the crazy growth of rooftop solar and other alternative energy sources and some big advances in energy efficiency that have caused the overall demand for electricity to stop growing. Meanwhile, utilities in New York are also required to buy the excess power from solar buildings that produce more than they need—a policy called "net metering".

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/solar-just-had-huge-win-new-york

It is one of the profound ironies of climate change that a state besieged by its effects — where coastal islands face existential threats and daily floods render major thoroughfares difficult to navigate — is also populated by powerful politicians who express deep suspicion of the relevant science.

This is Florida, the state of Sen. Marco Rubio (R), who said last year he doesn’t “believe human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate.” This is Florida, the state of former governor and Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush, who in 2009 called himself a global warming “skeptic.” And this is Florida, the state of Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who has punted on the issue. “Well, I’m not a scientist,” he told the Miami Herald’s Marc Caputo last year when asked if he was becoming less skeptical of man-made climate change.

According to a Sunday report from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, Scott’s aversion to discussions of man-made climate change has been brought to bear on a department charged with protecting a state that already exhibits many of the changes scientists predict will overtake other coastal regions. Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), as reported by writer Tristram Korten, have been restricted from using the term “climate change” or “global warming” in official correspondence.

The investigative reporting outfit called it an “unwritten policy,” which was “distributed verbally statewide” and has “affected” how one of the largest departments in the state, armed with a $1.4 billion budget and 3,200 employees, does business. “The irony is clearly apparent,” Korten told The Washington Post on Sunday night. “Florida is a peninsula with 1,200 miles of coastline, and when it comes to climate change, we’re the canary in the coalmine. And we’re relying on the state government to protect us and to plan for these changes.”

The report, published in the Miami Herald, was bolstered by the testimony of numerous former employees and e-mails from around the state. Kristina Trotta, who used to work in the DEP’s Miami office, said she was told during a 2014 meeting that she couldn’t employ terms such as “climate change” and “global warming.”

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/09/florida-state-most-affected-by-climate-change-reportedly-bans-term-climate-change/

Anote Tong, president of Kiribati, is at the UN disaster risk conference in Sendai, Japan, and has been speaking about the effects of Cyclone Pam on his country.

Cyclone Pam struck the Pacific … with Vanuatu bearing the full savagery of Pam, with effects also experienced in the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and of course in my country, in Kiribati …

We have heard that precious lives have been lost and a great deal of damage was done to infrastructure: homes, food sources, drinking water and communication and transport devastated.

Because of the scattered nature of the small islands that make up the Pacific island communities, it is not always easy to know full well the extent of the damage … It will take a few days to provide much needed help because no one knows what the situation is in these remote island communities.

It is sad but it is the most vulnerable who have been affected the most and we cannot help them when they need us most.

He extended his condolences to the president of Vanuatu, who is returning home from Japan today.

It is time to act … Let us match the rhetoric of these international gatherings with pledges and commitments as leaders to do our best to improve conditions and lives of those who need it most.

For leaders of low-lying island atolls, the hazards of global warming affect our people in different ways, and it is a catastrophe that impinges on our rights … and our survival into the future.

There will be a time when the waters will not recede.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/mar/16/cyclone-pam-vanuatu-hit-by-death-and-widespread-devastation-rolling-coverage#block-5506383fe4b0781f7aee0426