Too wet? Too cold? Too hot? This is how weather affects the trips we make

What sorts of weather lead us to change our daily travel behaviour? How do we respond to scorching heatwaves, sapping humidity, snow and frost, strong winds, or torrential rain? International research shows weather is important in shaping our everyday movements.

Very wet weather is likely to persuade many regular
cyclists and walkers to travel instead by car if
 they can. This is Bondi Junction after a storm hit Sydney.

The research evidence suggests that bad weather can lead to planned journeys being rescheduled, rerouted or cancelled. The consequences of these shifts in daily travel choices can include increases in traffic congestion and accidents, travel delays, mental stress, environmental pollution and general travel dissatisfaction.

Because people who travel by bike or walking are most likely to change travel plans in bad weather, some cities are responding with innovations such as heated bicycle lanes and sheltered walkways.

Read the piece on The Conversation - “Too wet? Too cold? Too hot? This is how weather affects the trips we make.”

The march of pseudoscience - in medicine, and climate conversations

Pseudoscience and misinformation has long plagued the climate change conversation.

Those who doubt the unequivocal and evidential science illustrating that humanity has disrupted earth’s climate system, continually turn to both pseudoscience and misinformation too support their views, either in the hope of stopping completely the conversation or at least derailing it sufficiently to allow profits from their undertakings to accrue before reality changes our behaviour.

Something similar has happened in medicine and Neuroscience PhD student Diana Lucia scientists discusses that on Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor.

She wonders whether science and the scientific method being replaced by the misinformation of pseudoscience, new-age therapies and quantum mysticism?

Diana has been trained to know that beliefs must be based on sufficient scientific evidence.

So, she argues, what place do courses in alternative medicine have in public Australian universities?

Listen to Ockham’s Razor on Radio National - “The march of pseudoscience.”

'Survivor guilt', although having not yet survived!

-       by Robert McLean

Death will personally arrive before our disrupted climate system tips into a new and troubling paradigm.

Or at least that is the interpretation drawn from predictions of the world’s climate scientists.

Most are saying that our climate will retain some sense of normality until about 2050 and from then on become rather weird, that is what we now consider extreme weather events, will become the “new-norm”.

Should I see a sunrise in 2050, I’ll be 102 (in theory not impossible as I have a family history of longevity), but even at 68 now, I have a strange and inverted-type of survivor guilt.

Most people live their lives with the unstated hope that they will leave the world a better place than they found it: that is not going to the case for me and so I have that puzzling survivor-guilt already, even it is unlikely I’ll be a survivor.

However, my kids and grandkids will still be about and it’s my behaviour, or at least that of my generation, that has left the world in a somewhat depleted state. I feel bad about that – it’s “survivor guilt” before I’m even really a survivor.

Individual responses and personal behaviour will have some impact, but the real change, the essential and critical change hinges on society’s willingness to allow for, or opt for a governance process that brings changes to how the world community lives and behaves.

History is loaded with stories of revolutions; revolutions that were social, industrial, or both, but generally they were aimed at ideas that improved human life, and often they did just that, but frequently at a cost.

However, those revolutions often brought with them untended consequences, outcomes misunderstood or simply not known about at the time, that are now manifesting themselves as climate change, a disrupted climate system that is bringing changes to life on earth that will make all pervious revolutions, no matter how extreme, appear quite pleasant.

So what do we do?

A former Australian PM said in talking about terrorists said, “Be alert, not alarmed”, but in considering climate change, we should modify that suggestion and be both “Alarmed and alert”.

Ever since the fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution of more than two centuries ago, which resulted in many life-enhancing ways, we have become largely untroubled and international alarm has only arisen when the world has gone to war.

However, that war-time alarm produced a wonderful harmoniousness among many resulting in some, to this day unparalleled achievements that morphed over the post-World War Two decades into an untroubled and comfortable way of life, certainly for the developed world, that has silently coerced people into a state of mind from which they cannot escape and make the urgent decisions needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Yes, we need to be alarmed just as we were on the eve of World Wars One and Two, and alert to the steps we need to take, as world community to do what must be done if we ware to employ our physical and intellectual skills; our resources, again physical and intellectual; and at least give those who follow a chance of living in a world without a seriously disrupted climate system.

And, should we be able to get beyond the school yard-like squabbles that presently have us so in their thrall, then maybe, just maybe, my future, and yours, will not be so filled with regret, or guilt.

Vanishing snowpacks will impact on millions of people

M

any people in the world depend upon a melting snowpack for their water.

Climate change is changing the behaviour of snowpacks and as the resulting flow of water lessens the use of water is going to become even more restricted, limiting it use as both drinking water and as a source of much needed water for agriculture.
Much parts of the U.S. is dependent on melting snow, but now the Seattle Times has reported that all mountain stations across Washington that measure snowpack are reporting the same number: zero.

Read the story - “Snowpack? What snowpack? State measurements show zero”.

Wisdom is our last resort

U.S. president Barack Obama was strongly
supported by the crowd at the University
of Queensland when he mentioned
climate change.

Wisdom is our last resort in fending off the worst of climate change.

Sadly it is a quality which has eluded many of the world’s leaders who are hostage to the idea that a burgeoning economy and its implicit growth will position all nations to deal with the unfolding dilemma of a damaged climate.

Unfortunately it is “game over” for the neo-liberals, who seemingly are unaware that nature bats last.

It takes a wise man to understand when a drought has started and someone of even greater wisdom to be able to comprehend that today’s behaviour is the foundation for the superstructure that will become your life.

Australia is presently governed by people who obviously understood that fundamentality and have risen to positions of power and influence, but like an in-grown toe-nail, that wisdom has lost its way, become painful and in terms of advancing Australia has become a burden, rather than a bonus.

Australia’s Treasurer, Joe Hockey, appeared on ABC24 today and struggled to answer questions from Barrie Cassidy about the importance of including discussions about climate change on the G20 Summit agenda.

Adhering to his government’s line that the G20 was about the economy, which he said would help lift people out of poverty, secure jobs for millions and enrich the world’s infrastructure, Mr Hockey appeared unable to connect a healthy economy to a stable climate; a climate that ensures humanity, and the countless other species we depend upon, can survive and prosper.

The wisdom Australia so urgently needs is not be found in Canberra, and so wasn’t at the G20 Summit, but the wisdom does exist and was on show in the audience for the world to see when U.S. President, Barack Obama, spoke at the University of Queensland soon after arriving in Australia.

We know about climate change, but still we prevaricate

by Robert McLean

Only retrospective judgement allows for the pinpointing of a drought’s beginnings.

Climate change is a different beast – we already know pretty much when it began, or at least when the symptoms became clearly obvious, and yet the world still prevaricates.

Serious difficulties demand equally serious responses and while we have quibbled about the seriousness and reality of the unfolding catastrophe, opportunities for effective mitigation have slipped away and now the conversation has changed to adaptation.

Confusing the conversation is an array of morals, values, ethics, ideologies, religious beliefs, cultural attachments, economic dogmas, emotive drivers, a reality obscuring educative understanding of the science and even worse, a zero or near zero realization that the world is in serious trouble.

Intertwined with all that is our sweeping inability to see that humanity’s wellbeing is not inextricably linked to how the world fares economically, rather in a striking contradictory way our lives become richer, more complete and more rewarding as we connect with others, something that becomes obvious during times of stress, whether that be personal or a societal difficulty brought upon us either by nature or through the corruption of our behaviour toward each other.

Our response to climate change needs to be swift, decisive and in that take humanity in a different direction.

The question that if often asked, and most feared I suspect, is “What do I do now?”

Such questions are mostly greeted with a pall of silence or a retreat in a rhetorical answer in which the science of climate change is used to protect the answerer from the need to arrive at and provide a definitive answer, for to do so threatens everything upon which modern society depends.

Mitigation and adaptation ideas become increasingly byzantine as the circumstances disrupting earth’s atmosphere are more apparent and obvious, but in almost every instance it is about protecting and allowing for the continuation of the modern life that particularly the developed world presently enjoys.

The sheer numbers of humans who walk the earth is an obvious problem, but that is not insurmountable and if for a moment we could abandon the values, cultural morals and ethics, and ideologies to which we are wedded and put the boundless beauty of humanity ahead of the perverse need for personal possession and power, then it is possible we could meet the challenge spelt out so clearly by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest pre-Paris 2015 synthesis report.

Clearly we face dire times and so any response needs to be daring and demanding of courageous leadership hitherto unseen, certainly in Australia.

Having rattled in about that, I urge you to read this unrelated piece by Tristan Edis from the Climate Spectator headed: “Three heroes of climate change denial - a synthesis report”.

Quantock is desperately serious and yet disarmingly quirky

Rod Quantock.

Rod Quantock is desperately serious about the complications and implications arising from climate change, but through his quirky behaviour softens the conversation through humour and humanizes this strangely inhuman-like thing.

Quantock, a thinker, advisor to the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and nationally-known comedian, was in Shepparton yesterday (September 10) for the launch the “Slap Energy” forum planned for Friday, September 26.

Watched by about 30 people and several news outlet representatives, Quantock and the Member for Shepparton, Jeanette Powell, discussed climate change, with the latter launching the September 26 event.

Quantock had earlier in the day been to Shepparton’s McGuire College to talk with some 30 students about the unfolding dilemmas humanity is facing.

Looked at analytically, the information given by Quantock was alarming, but when seasoned with the comedian’s idiosyncratic zest, it is simply entertaining

and yet, thought provoking.

Students at both sessions were taken on a Quantock-like history lesson right from the big-bang to now with the important eras being explained by Quantock and illustrated by volunteers who were “the big bang”, “time”, “now”, “earth” and a “dinosaur”.

In discussing the reality that the world has too many people, Quantock pointed out that when he was born, the world has just 2.5 billion people and now it was home to more than seven billion.

One student obviously unable to comprehend or understand how such a change could happen in one man’s lifetime, assumed the fellow standing before them and telling the story must have been much older than he looked and asked: “How old are you?”

Solutions and immediate action were not part of Quantock’s presentation, accept that he did encourage the students to engage with the AustralianYouth Climate Coalition (AYCC).

Looking back to understand tomorrow

Aristotle - he has
the key to
understanding
our future.

It seems we will need to go back to the ancient philosopher Aristotle to increase our chances of combatting climate change.

Conveying something as abstract as climate change to most people demands the inventive use of metaphors and it was Aristotle he said that the ‘greatest thing was to be the master of metaphor’.

The connection to Aristotle and metaphors was discussed in a Climate Progress story headed: “Earth’s rate of global warming is 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day”.

That is wonderful metaphor, but the shock of Hiroshima reverberated around the world nearly 70 years ago and most able to best influence our behaviour had not been born and so it oddly means little.

The reality of a changing climate is so remote from the minds of most, that they will only understand what it means when it is effectively too late to respond.

'Voters are being played for mugs' - The Monthly

The Monthly has been keeping us abreast of what is happening in the world of politics in the lead-up to Saturday’s Federal Election.
This latest post brings alarming news – judge it as you will, but if ever the idea of “cheating” could be levelled at a political party for its election campaign behaviour, this is it.

The Liberal Party has always nosily trumpeted it economic strengths, but in this instance it has excelled only at avoiding a confrontation with reality – it’s primary opponents, the Labor Party, has clearly done well at managing Australia’s economy in rather difficult circumstances, but in treating electors like dills, the Liberals have not given us accurate figures, rather we have been taken up the garden path.

This what The Monthly editor, Nick Feik, wrote:

FIGURES IN HIDING

The Coalition has been remarkably adept at avoiding scrutiny of its economic policies and rhetoric throughout the campaign, and this continues today.

It won't release official costings, and has no intention of releasing any before the election. Instead Hockey will present an isolated set of figures purporting to list policies that will marginally improve the budget position, reportedly by $6 billion over the next 4 years.

Nevertheless, voters around the country are today seeing headlines such as 'Coalition savings hit $40 billion,' and articles suggesting the Coalition's costings will all be revealed.

The people voting – and the 2 million who have already voted – are poorly served by ongoing coverage such as this.

The bottom line is that the Coalition is promising to make no major cuts to the budget. Ironically, after years of 'debt and deficit' talk, it is going to the election with a policy platform that entirely sidesteps the 'budget emergency' that it decried.

One final point: the Coalition's excuse for not releasing even these costings until the last days of the campaign was that it couldn't do so until it had announced all of its policies. The Coalition hasn't announced any policies that would have any serious fiscal impact for over a week. Voters are being played for mugs.