A festering carcass

By Oliver Kornetzke 

US inflation starts to rise

US inflation has started to rise, in consequence of the swingeing jump in tariffs.   It took a bit longer than I expected, probably because stocks (inventories) were higher than I thought.  But now that businesses have run down their pre-tariff stocks, they have no choice but to pass on their increased costs.  No doubt, as inflation gathers momentum, they will also be indulging in a bit of "greedflation", as they did in the post-covid inflation surge.   

But it's not just tariffs. The government's campaign against immigrants has meant that food prices are soaring, because immigrants pick and pack the USA's food.  (Coffee is rising because of global warming, and because of 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee imports)

In my judgment, neither of these forces is anywhere near over.  Prices will continue to rise until equilibrium is reached, and that will be several months away.

The Fed could "look through" this surge in inflation, on the argument that it will not be a sustained jump in the inflation rate, but a one-off adjustment in price levels.  "Cost-push" rather than demand-led inflation.  That is what markets (shares, bonds and currencies) think will happen, and the next cut in rates later this month seems baked in.  

This rise in inflation will reduce real (inflation-adjusted) incomes, reducing spending, deepening the economic downturn.  This might seem to be an argument for further rate cuts, if it happens, but just as the inflation might be transitory, so would the economic downturn caused by that inflation.

Now, it is possible that wages may rise to compensate---which I do not think will happen---but if they do this will heighten Fed fears that higher inflation is becoming embedded in the system, which means they won't cut interest rates any further.

So, the Fed moves depend on data over the next few months.  If the economy continues to weaken, and wage inflation doesn't accelerate, the Fed will prolly cut the Fed Funds rate again.  If the economy stabilises, then the Fed will have the luxury of waiting for the inflation surge to slow, and it prolly won't cut rates again.  If wage inflation starts to pick up, all rate cuts are out of the question.  

I'm not at all sure what the inflation rate will peak at, but I wouldn't be surprised if it nears 5% by year-end or early in 2026.  This will be a very uncomfortable environment for the Fed to cut rates, as opposed to keeping them stable.  It will need to be quite sure that the rise in the inflation rate is transitory.  And that its moves are not seen as a response to Trump's pressure, which would destroy its credibility.

This is what accelerated warming looks like

 From Leon Simons

Sea Surface Temperatures in this region increased more during the previous 15 years than in the preceding 150 years. This is what accelerated warming looks like [temperature]:

 

Somewhat worse [water vapour]:

Catastrophe awaits us. We stumble towards the precipice like zombies, too stupid and too greedy to take action.

Make myself richer

 By John Deering

40 years on .....

And even the phones:  they want us to buy a new one every year. 

If you hold a Shell to your ear

 A cartoon by Ben Jennings

The sooner all cars and light trucks are EVs/PHEVs, the better.

3 metres of sea level rise

A researcher holds ancient air trapped as gas bubbles within ice.
Photograph: AntarcticScience.com

From The Guardian:

Mass melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, driven by warmer ocean temperatures, was a major cause of extreme sea level rise more than 100,000 years ago, according to new research.

A research team, led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, examined the cause of high sea levels during a period known as the last interglacial, which occurred 129,000-116,000 years ago.

Their study finds that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet caused a sea-level rise of more than three metres and it took less than 2C of ocean warming for that to occur.

The study’s lead author Chris Turney is a climate change and earth scientist at UNSW [University of New South Wales].

He said the West Antarctic was particularly vulnerable to ocean warming because it sits mostly on the sea bed, rather than on land.

“This has been a big concern and is what the concern is in the present day,” Turney said.

“So the question is how much could fall into the ocean and this is where the last interglacial [period] is so important.”

To trace Antarctica’s potential contribution to this sea-level rise, the scientists travelled to West Antarctica to the Patriot Hills Blue Ice Area, which is on the periphery of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Blue ice areas are created by katabatic winds. When these winds blow over mountains, they remove snow and ice, allowing ancient ice to come to the surface.

A lot of Antarctic research involves deep ice core drilling to study years of climate history.  In this study, the researchers used what they called “horizontal ice core” analysis, which involved simply walking across the valley towards the mountain.

“As you walk towards the mountain, you walk over increasingly older ice,” Turney said.

They used some shallow drilling to take ice samples from the surface. Through isotope measurements, they found a gap in the ice sheet record immediately prior to the last interglacial.  Turney said this gap coincided with an extreme rise in sea level and suggested a period in which there was no ice accumulating in that valley.

“It means that a large part of the west Antarctic almost certainly disappeared in the last interglacial. It melted. It flowed rapidly into the ocean,” he said.

He said the research also suggested this mass melting happened quite early during the ocean warming “somewhere between zero and 2C”. 

Turney said the current summer in Australia alone had shown the dangers of a warming world just at 1C.   “What these results suggest, or show, is that when people talk about a 2C warmer world as a good thing, actually what it shows is we don’t want to get close to 2C,” he said.

The paper says ocean temperatures during the last interglacial were likely up to 2C warmer than they are today and global sea levels were 6-9 metres higher.

3 metres is 10 feet in the old measurement.  And that's just the first stage.  The sea level will rise another 3 to 6 metres after that, and if temperatures go on rising, more and still more.  We can kiss the Netherlands and Denmark and Finland and London and Bangladesh and Alexandria and Miami goodbye.  And hundreds of other towns and villages.  Or we can build prodigiously expensive dikes, which will have to be 9 metres high (to allow for storm surges).  And we can't even do that for Miami, because it's built on an ancient coral reef, which is porous.  In Miami, they still vote for the denialist Republican Party.  Against stupidity, the Gods themselves are helpless.

All because the human race is too stupid, too greedy, too focussed on the short-term, too ignorant to bother finding out the truth, too lazy to act on it.  And because of the contemptible lies and disinformation spread by fossil fuel companies and parroted by right-wing commentators, news media and politicians.

Trees bring rain

Land clearing in a paddock outside Moree NSW
Source: The Guardian

My mother used to say that, and I didn't believe her.  Arrogant pup!  Here's an excerpt from a deeply depressing Guardian article about land clearing in Australia which explains how the process works:

Prof Clive McAlpine from University of Queensland explains that not only does land clearing release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it also has an effect on climate, well beyond the emissions.

“It causes warming locally, regionally and even globally, and it changes rainfall by altering the circulation of heat and moisture,” he says.

“Trees evaporate more water than any other vegetation type – up to 10 times more than crops and pastures. This is because trees have root systems that can access moisture deep within the soil.”

The increased evaporation and rough surface of trees create moist, turbulent layers in the lower atmosphere, he says. “This reduces temperatures and contributes to cloud formation and increased rainfall. The increased rainfall then provides more moisture to soils and vegetation.

“The clearing of deep-rooted native vegetation for shallow-rooted crops and pastures diminishes this process, resulting in a warmer and drier climate.”

McAlpine argues that we should be replanting in the north-west of NSW and south-west Queensland to achieve a tree density of 40% to stabilise the local climate. Grazing would still be possible underneath the tree cover.

This is why the centre of continents at the equator have high precipitation.  At the coasts, the rain comes from moist air from the sea.  But it falls on rain forests, and the trees transpire water vapour into the air.  In the tropics, an acre of rain forest puts more water vapour into the air than an acre of sea.  This water vapour then falls on forests further inland and the process is repeated.  So even in the heart of the continent, there is rain and rain forest, and the two go together.  Which is why land clearing can create a desert. 

As a species, we seem bent on destroying our world.

Emissions just keep on rising

To reach zero carbon by 2050, emissions need to start falling by 3.3% per annum, stepping up to 4% per annum by 2025 and 5% per annum by 2030.  Instead, they are still rising. 

And cutting emissions by 3.3% per year from now on is perfectly feasible.  We just have to replace coal power everywhere by renewables "firmed" with 8 hours of storage.  Already, in most countries, this option is cheaper than new coal, and in some countries cheaper even than existing coal.  Doing this alone by 2030 or 35 will reduce global emissions in total by 25%, or about 2% per annum compound. 

By replacing our existing ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle fleet with EVs, we will be able to cut (global) emissions by another 14%, raising the combined annual reduction to a compound 3.3% per annum.  And that's before we even start to deal with emissions from industry (iron and steel, cement, chemicals)  where, again, cutting emissions will be easy.  For example, we can produce iron and steel using green electricity and green methane.  We can capture the CO₂ from the chimney stacks of cement plants and use pump it underground into basaltic rock.  Agriculture will be hard, both politically and technically, but we can stop land clearing right now.  If we wanted to. 

Let's not set some distant goal, where the politicians now in power will be long retired, and will be able to lie and shrug, and say "we did our best".  Let us set ourselves a goal of a 3.3% per annum cut in emissions.  In 15 years that will cut emissions by 40%, in 25 by 60%, and in 40 by 80%.  Not enough, but incomparably better than the current reality which is that emissions are rising.

It is a climate emergency, and still we aren't acting to cut emissions with enough determination and simple nous to save ourselves. 

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.

Yet too stupid and venal and short-sighted to act to stop his own home burning down.  I despair.

Source: EPA

Amazon deforestation may start feeding on itself

Source: The Economist

From The Economist:

SINCE THE 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² (1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams and other forms of development—an area equivalent to that of Turkey and bigger than that of Texas. Scientists worry this is uncomfortably close to the threshold for tree loss, of between 20 and 25%, beyond which deforestation begins to feed on itself, turning much of the Amazon basin into drier savannah known as cerrado. Under Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing president of Brazil who was inaugurated in January, the Amazon appears to be rushing towards that tipping point.

The deforestation rate had slowed between 2004 and 2012, when the government beefed up its environmental protection agency, Ibama, and an international Amazon Fund was created to pay for conservation projects. But it began ticking up again after a weakening of environmental legislation and budget cuts during Brazil’s recession of 2014-2016. Between August 2017 and July 2018 Brazil lost 7,900km² of Amazon forest—nearly a billion trees. This year’s figure is almost sure to be higher. Preliminary satellite data showed that 920 km² were cleared in June, 88% more than the same month in 2018. In July 2,255 km² were cleared, a startling 278% more than the same month last year (see chart).

Environmentalists blame Mr Bolsonaro’s insouciance about the Amazon. It is a “virgin” that should be “exploited” for agriculture, mining and infrastructure projects, he says. The environment minister, Ricardo Salles, fired 21 of Ibama’s 27 heads; he has yet to replace most of them, crippling the agency’s enforcement duties. In response to increasing alarm about the jump in tree-clearing, Mr Bolsonaro fired the head of the agency that tracks deforestation, called the data “lies” and told a journalist that those concerned about the environment should eat less and “shit every other day.”

The consequences of the destruction of the Amazon rain forest will be severe.

The forest also influences the water cycle on a regional and perhaps even global scale. As moisture comes off the Atlantic Ocean it falls on the forest as rain. This water gets sucked up by deep roots, then moves through plants and across the surface of leaves before returning to the atmosphere. Winds blowing over the uneven forest canopy create turbulence, which allows the atmosphere to absorb more moisture.

All this water then moves like a giant flowing river in the sky, falling as rain and then evaporating again and again until it reaches the Andes. Ultimately, the forest produces at least half of its own rain.

"One water vapor molecule may be recycled five to seven times before it leaves the system, either through the atmosphere or the Amazon River," says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of Sao Paulo's Institute for Advanced Studies.

But experts increasingly fear this delicate exchange could collapse. The loss of just a fraction more of this moisture-creating forest could lead far more of it to dry out, which would reduce rainfall even more, in a self-reinforcing spiral. Already, climate change, decades of logging, and land-clearing by intentionally set wildfires have sparked record-setting droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016.
Even as Bolsonaro prepares to take office, the Amazon is already changing.

The dry season is lengthening and rainfall has dropped by a quarter in some regions. Meanwhile, precipitation, when it comes, sometimes arrives in more intense bursts, leading to massive floods in 2009, 2012, and 2014. The region's climate system is oscillating more wildly.

In the study she led, published in the journal Global Change Biology with more than a hundred other scientists as co-authors, Esquivel-Muelbert found that during the past 30 years, more drought-tolerant plant species have appeared in the Amazon, while species that predominantly emerge in wet areas are declining. Fast-growing trees and taller trees that are better at accessing the sun are outcompeting shorter, damp-loving species.

[Read more here]

Brazil's (and Indonesia's) massive deforestation more than undoes the rest of the world's reforestation efforts.  Sometimes I am convinced that mankind is doomed, thanks to our own greed and stupidity.  And what is it about the extreme right that they are so hostile to facts?

The Right continues to lie about climate change

Scott Morrison, PM of Australia, fondling a lump of coal in Parliament

This time in Australia, where there is a federal general election in 2 weeks.  The right-wing "Liberal" party commissioned a fossil-fuel economist to "cost" Labor's policy.  Using absurd assumptions he came up with the required answer: hundred of billions.  Trouble is, his analysis was rubbish.

35% of Oz's emissions are from electricity generation. Snowy Hydro recently stated that it could source green electricity for $40/MWh, and "firmed" green electricity for $60 or $70/MWh (presumably $60 for wind and $70 for solar, since you need more storage to "firm" solar). "Firmed" electricity is generation with enough storage added to mimic the output of a baseload coal/gas/nuclear power plant.

By comparison, 3 years ago wind without firming cost $60/MWh and solar $70. That's how rapidly the cost of renewables is falling. Snowy also said that the fuel cost alone of coal is $56/MWh. Just the fuel. Not maintenance, not repairs, not staffing. Just fuel. The wholesale price of electricity varies from day to day, hour to hour and state to state, but $80-100/MWh would be a reasonable average. So even "firmed" renewable electricity generation is cheaper than the electricity costs of the existing coal-based grid. That's without even considering the continued declines in cost in solar, wind and storage.

On top of that, our fleet of coal generators is aging, and will anyway have to be progressively retired over the next 20 years.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles will reach "sticker price" parity with petrol vehicles in 2022 for big cars and 2025 for small. Transport emissions are another 18% of total Australian emissions.

The moral of the story is that cutting emissions by Labor's target of 45% by 2030 won't cost us anything because we will be replacing clapped out fossil fuel equipment with new, cheaper, green generation and transport. There will be no cost to the economy. In fact we will benefit from ever cheaper electricity.

I still don't know why the Right is so misinformed about climate change and the cost of renewables.  Maybe it has something to do with "contributions" from the fossil fuel industry.

Saying and doing

Two reports show how companies are talking big about how they care about climate change and that they are "committed" to dealing with it.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they continue to support global warming.

From DeSmogBlog:

A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.

Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S. — while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.

InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.

InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.”

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

From EcoWatch:

A report published Wednesday names the banks that have played the biggest recent role in funding fossil fuel projects, finding that since 2016, immediately following the Paris agreement's adoption, 33 global banks have poured $1.9 trillion into financing climate-changing projects worldwide.


The top four banks that invested most heavily in fossil fuel projects are all based in the U.S., and include JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America. Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays in Europe, Japan's MUFG, TD Bank, Scotiabank and Mizuho make up the remainder of the top 10. 

This report comes as March has already brought deadly weather to places such as the American Midwest, where historic flooding has left four dead and farm losses could reach $1 billion, and Mozambique, where Tropical Cyclone Idai has devastated the East African country and President Filipe Nyusi estimated that more than a thousand people are likely dead.

Both disasters have been linked to climate change. "Increased flooding is one of the clearest signals of a changing climate," said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben in a statement published by ThinkProgress, adding that flooded Nebraska's "current trauma is part of everyone's future."

Nebraska flooding

Politicians, companies, billionaires have started talking the talk, because it's obvious to everyone that global warming is happening and will be catastrophic, and that ordinary people are afraid and concerned.  But they are not walking the walk. 

 Time to call them out.  We have just 30 years to get to zero emissions.  To reach that goal, emissions must fall by 9% per annum, compound.  In fact, last year they went up.  We are losing the fight.

The dotty Right and dirt-cheap renewables in Oz

Note that the blue areas in the west of the country are deserts, with normally very low rainfall. 
Even a small increase creates a record high.  

The "Liberal"/"National" coalition is in power at Federal level in Australia.  A far-right minority within the government has hijacked the party and caused it to veer to the right, especially for climate change policy.  They have scuttled down the rabbit-hole of denialism and coal worship.  The L/NP has also, over the last 30 years embraced the mantra of privatisation, selling off Federally owned and state-owned bodies such as banks and electricity utilities.  This has led to a dramatic rise in retail electricity prices, taking our electricity costs to more or less double the USA's. 

Meanwhile, the "National" Party, formerly the Country Party, which has (or had) its strength in the bush, has stopped caring about the welfare of farmers and essentially now works only for the interests of coal and gas resource companies.  Even in the bush, perhaps specially in the bush, people know that global warming is happening, because they experience the effects of record temperatures in summer, record droughts, and record floods.  And they know that burning more coal will just make things worse.  Recent Federal by-elections and state general elections have shown conclusively that the public wants action on climate change.  So the L/NP government is pretending to tackle the issue.  It has threatened to force electricity utilities to cut prices (how?) has stated again and again that Oz's emissions are falling, in the teeth of the evidence, and is still planning to subsidise new coal power stations, which it needs to do if they are to be built at all, because coal is now so much more expensive than renewables.

Dear L/NP--you want to cut electricity prices? Switch to renewables. Snowy River (owned by the Federal government!) recently stated that it got average prices of $40/MWh for its tenders for wind and solar power. That's for the whole tooty: capital cost, depreciation, interest charges, and maintenance.  Of course "fuel" is free. They also stated that the fuel cost alone (i.e., before maintenance) for coal-fired power stations was $56/MWh. Even adding the cost of "firming" (i.e., converting the variable output of wind and solar to the profile offered by fossil fuels) renewable electricity would cost just $60-$70/MWh. (Source)

This is below the wholesale electricity price, which is $93/MWh in Queensland, $104/MWh in NSW and $128/MWh in Victoria. (Source)

So if we switch to renewables, we would halve wholesale electricity prices.  And tighter regulation of the (now) privately owned grid would help push down retail electricity prices on the back of that.

What is it about the Right that they remain so ignorant?

Their cretinism goes deeper than that.  To show just how much they love coal (who is crossing their palms with silver, I wonder?) they plan to build more heavily subsidised coal power stations to replace Oz's aging generation fleet.  They can't stop the shift from coal globally, but they think that if somehow they support coal in Australia, then world coal demand will hold up. A kind of magical realism.

But it won't, for two reasons.  (Need I say it?)

The first is the obvious one: although the Nats (and the rabid right wing of the Libbies) continue their simple-minded faith in the climate denialist cause, the rest of the world (apart from the quite demented Republicans) has moved on. The rest of the world knows that climate change is happening, that we are causing it, that a major cause is burning coal.  Recent heatwaves in Europe and China have made the fact of global warming obvious.  

The second is that renewables are cheaper than coal, in some places (US/Australia/India) cheaper than the fuel cost of coal power. So even if the increasingly demented L/NP funds Ozzie coal power stations it won't make a blind bit of difference to world demand. Coal is finished.

Rational people would accept this, and start planning for the new reality. Not the L/NP! There was a time when the Right side of politics was rational and pragmatic and it was the Left who believed in Utopian ideals. Now the Right has discarded logic, truth and common sense, and digs deep into the poisonous pit of delusion. It will end very badly for them.

The last Knysna elephant

The last Knysna elephant
Source: S A National Parks

The Knysna elephants in South Africa were all that survived of the giant herds which once roamed the temperate southern forests of the Outeniqua/Tsitsikamma area of the former Cape Province.

Now a recent report confirms that there is only one elephant left.

A sobering 15-month study on the declining population of the southernmost herd of African elephants has determined only one elephant, a mature female, is free-roaming in the Knysna forest in South Africa.

The analysis—titled And Then There Was One—was recently published in the African Journal of Wildlife Research.

For the study, researchers set up camera trap across the whole elephant range from July 2016 to October 2017 and concluded upon analysis that the female elephant, estimated at 45 years old, was by herself.

"Because elephants move along defined elephant pathways, we placed our cameras on these paths and covered the elephant range evenly, with spaces between camera traps no larger than the smallest range recorded for elephants," one of the study's authors Lizette Moolman, a South African National Parks scientist, explained in an article posted to the park's website.

"In other words, an elephant would not reside in a gap area, between camera trap locations, for the duration of the survey. The cameras were all active for 15 months, and during this time the same female elephant was identified in 140 capture events, always by herself. No other elephants were photographically captured."

Fellow researchers behind the study were shocked to find only one elephant left in Knysna, as the gentle giants historically roamed the area in the thousands.

"The brutal reality is there is no longer a population of Knysna elephants," study co-author Graham Kerley of the of Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University, told Business Day. "All the mystique of the Knysna elephant is reduced to a single elephant left in rather tragic circumstances."

While the solitary elephant appears in relatively good shape, Kerley explained to Business Day that she has swollen temporal glands with excessive temporal streaming, suggesting she might be stressed from being alone.

According to the National Elephant Center, female African elephants are social creatures and usually roam in herds with a number of related female adults and male and female offspring.

The maximum lifespan for females is more than 65 years, so the lone Knysna elephant could be by herself for two more decades.

As for capturing her and moving her to other elephant populations, Kerley noted that "would be dangerous for her and we don't know if it would even be of any value to her as she knows the forest and she might not be able to settle into another area with other elephants."

Images of her show that her breasts are undeveloped and her mammary glands are shriveled, meaning she has likely never been pregnant or has not given birth in a long time, according to Business Day. Artificially inseminating her would be too risky to attempt, Kerley said.

"Considering all these factors, the debate about how we have allowed this population to go functionally extinct and how to manage the last elephant is very emotional and very serious as she is a symbol of how we are treating biodiversity as a whole," Kerley told the publication.

[Read more here]

When I read a report like this, it is impossible to contain my contempt for mankind.  If we destroy ourselves and our civilisation via global warming or through the destruction of insect life, our fate will be richly deserved.  Greed, selfishness and folly.  Do we even deserve to survive? 

Hottest month ever

More than 20 decomposing horses were discovered at a dried-up pool in northern Australia ( Facebook/Alice Springs Community Forum )
Source: The Independent

From The Guardian:

January was Australia’s hottest month on record, with the country’s mean temperature exceeding 30C for the first time since records began in 1910.

The Bureau of Meteorology released its climate summary for January on Friday and said the widespread heatwave conditions and daily extremes were “unprecedented”.

“There’s been so many records it’s really hard to count,” said Andrew Watkins, a senior climatologist at the Bom.

January was Australia’s warmest month for mean, maximum and minimum temperatures.

Large parts of Australia received only 20% of their normal rainfall, particularly throughout the south-east in Victoria and parts of New South Wales and South Australia.

Tasmania, which has been battling bushfires throughout the past month, had its driest ever January.

Watkins said Borrona Downs in north-west NSW broke the record for hottest minimum temperature, registering one night at 36.6C.

Port Augusta recorded the country’s highest ever temperature in January, reaching 49.5C.

“We’ve also seen records in many states set including places like Victoria where Swan Hill and Kerang got up over 47.5C,” Watkins said.

Menindee in far-west NSW, the site of December and January’s mass fish kills, had four days in a row of temperatures above 47C.

In parts of western Queensland and western NSW, there have been long strings of more than 40 days of temperatures above 40C.

Cloncurry had 43 days in a row that exceeded 40C.

Birdsville in the state’s west had 16 days in January of temperatures higher than 45C and 10 of those days were in a row.

New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and the Northern Territory all had their warmest January on record.

[Read more here]

I notice that our dotty Right (the "Liberal"/"National" Party coalition) has been completely silent on this environmental catastrophe, except to continue to promote coal power stations.  It is impossible for me now to hold them in any more contempt than I do.  Remember when Tony Abbott said "climate change is crap"?  And President Klutz said it's all a Chinese plot? 

Why are we so beset by cretins?

You do this ..... you get this

You do this:

There is no way you can write the sentence, “The treasurer of Australia, Scott Morrison, came to question time with a lump of coal on Thursday,” and have that sentence seem anything other than the ravings of a psychedelic trip, so let’s just say it and be done with it.

Scott Morrison brought coal into the House of Representatives. A nice big hunk of black coal, kindly supplied by the Minerals Council of Australia.

“This is coal,” the treasurer said triumphantly, brandishing the trophy as if he’d just stumbled across an exotic species previously thought to be extinct.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, soothingly, “don’t be scared.”

No one was afraid, or scared. People were just confused. What was this fresh idiocy?

You get this:

A third fish kill has occurred near Menindee on the Darling River overnight after temperatures plummeted following days of hot weather.

The latest fish kill follows an incident on 6 and 7 January in which hundreds of thousands of native fish, including Murray cod, golden perch and bony bream died around the Menindee weir.

There was also another mass kill before Christmas.

“This is likely worse than the last time,” said local Graeme McCrabb, who on Monday morning was down at the water’s edge at the back of the township, above Weir 32.

“I’ve just picked up a 50cm golden perch, and there are tens of thousands of little bony bream, dead.

“There are fish all around me just gasping for breath,” he said.

Never has it been more obvious that the Right would rather the Earth was destroyed than give up their pet obsessions and their corruption.

Lord Cheeto blames environmentalism for California fires

Well what did you expect?  Honesty, logic or sense from our Donald?  How we laughed.

From Dana Nuccitelli at The Guardian:

Last week, 18 wildfires were burning at once in California, including its largest in history, destroying over 1,100 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate. The smoke made the air in the state’s Central Valley unhealthy to breathe for a record 15 consecutive days, as I can personally attest.

Donald Trump decided to use the opportunity to renew his war with California by nonsensically blaming the wildfires on environmental laws:

"California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading! "

Climate change is making wildfires bigger.  Zeke Hausfather showed in an analysis for Carbon Brief that there’s a strong correlation between temperatures and the total area of forests burned in the western USA.

A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 75% of year-to-year variations in area burned by wildfires in the western US can be explained by fuel aridity (a combination of temperature and precipitation).

Source: The Guardian

Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests … and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984

July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. The past four years were the state’s four hottest, and 2018 is on pace to also finish in California’s top-five hottest years. Plus, California just recently emerged from its worst drought in over a millennium, which was likewise amplified by global warming and created plentiful wildfire fuel.

Source: The Guardian

[Read more here.  And by the way, it's worth subscribing, even for just $10 per month.  It's an excellent newspaper.]

Heat waves gone wild

From the BBC:

Thousands of fish have died in Swiss sections of the River Rhine as Europe's heatwave continues.  Swiss authorities say they have pulled a tonne of dead fish from the river and have tried to implement emergency measures to save others. The rising heat has lowered oxygen levels in the water, making it hard for fish to survive. 

Europe is experiencing a prolonged heatwave that has caused wildfires as far north as the Arctic Circle.

Source: BBC

From Open Mind:

This summer we haven’t just had heat waves, we’ve seen them plaguing vast areas around the northern hemisphere. Intense heat in Sweden sparked an epidemic of wildfires in their drought-stricken forests, so bad that they had to ask other nations for help. A dozen of the wildfires were in the Arctic circle, no less.

Ouargla, Algeria noted the highest reliable temperature ever recorded in Africa at 51.3°C (124°F). Kumagaya, Japan saw the highest temperature ever recorded in Japan at 41.1°C (106°F), while the death toll hit 30 and thousands more needed hospital treatment for heat-related conditions. California broke so many temperature records in their heat wave that increased use of air conditioning caused power shortages. In Britain, the heat melted the roof of Glasgow’s Science Centre, and caused a garbage truck to get stuck in — not on, but in — the road when the asphalt melted.

Perhaps most unexpected, a blistering heat wave in Canada (yes, Canada!) has filled Montreal’s morgue with the bodies of those who died from the heat; many corpses had to be stored elsewhere in the city. Montreal coroner Jean Brochu said it was first time the city’s morgue had been overwhelmed this way.

The U.K. Guardian has an excellent report on the story. It points out that part of the reason for the global oven is the jet stream, which has been “stuck” in a wavy pattern which makes systems linger so long that the heat becomes unbearable. But it’s not just the jet stream; that has happened before. What makes this worse, noted Tim Osborn of the Climate Research Unit in the U.K., is that “The baseline on which these effects operated is very different today. Since 1976 we have had several decades of global warming — caused by rising carbon emissions – which has raised baseline global temperatures significantly.”

Even the stuck jet stream may be linked to man-made climate change. Mann et al. (2017) note that such events are linked to “high-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves,” and that climate change favors conditions of “quasi-resonant amplification (QRA),” possibly linked to amplified Arctic warming. So — not only are extreme heat waves worse because of man-made global warming, they may also be more likely because of man-made climate change.

[Read more here]

I still encounter people who don't "believe" in global warming.  "You can't prove this heatwave is caused by global warming," they say.  Well, we can't "prove" any individual case of lung cancer is caused by smoking.  But we do know, with a very high degree of certainty, that smoking causes lung cancer.  We have the statistical relationship, we have the aetiology.  It's kind of obvious.  In both cases.

Untouched, you say?

A cartoon by Pat Bagley

The evil stupidity of climate denialism

This is a post from Open Mind.  I'm posting it in its entirety because I think it's excellent.

Imagine every single report ever about the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, from the 1960s when the surgeon general’s report came out up to the present day, beginning with the statement that “No single case of lung cancer can be definitively linked to smoking.”

Now imagine being inundated by op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and reports from Fox News on the link between cigarettes and heart disease saying that People got heart disease long before there were cigarettes. Heart disease rates are always changing. It’s just a natural variation. Imagine someone “adjusting” rates of emphysema for the increase in population at risk, levels of ozone (natural of course, not man-made), the growth of urban vs. rural population, and concluding that emphysema has actually declined since people started smoking. Imagine someone repeating again and again that laryngeal cancer is mainly due to changes in the output of the sun. 

Imagine the surgeon general pointing out that there is a huge consensus among physicians and medical researchers that smoking exaggerates all those illnesses, but a public relations guy appears and says there’s no such consensus — it’s based on flawed reports, he says, it’s just a made-up hoax. Imagine a “petition” from a group calling themselves the “Institute of science and medicine” claiming that over 31,000 scientists have signed their petition endorsing their view that There is no convincing scientific evidence that smoking is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic health impact … and that …there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in smoking produce many beneficial effects …

Imagine hearings in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives disputing the health impacts of smoking. Imagine four U.S. Senators calling for an end to a smoking-education program, calling it “propaganda.” Imagine the chairman of the committee on space, science, and technology calling the scientific evidence a fraud. Imagine a congressman suggesting that increases in lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema are due to rocks and dirt filling up our lungs. Imagine the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania saying that one of the causes of lung cancer is … body heat from increased population.


Imagine the president of the United States tweeting that the smoking-disease link is just a hoax, a plot devised by the Chinese to make the American tobacco industry non-competitive.

If you can imagine that, then you know what the current political “climate” in the U.S.A. is like when it comes to the subject of man-made climate change.

There are always interesting articles at his blog.  I recommend it.