Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide

BRUNY ISLAND, Australia — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.

An out-of-control fire in Hillville, in the Australian
state of New South Wales, on November 12.Credit...

The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.

The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.

Read the opinion piece by Richard Flanagan from The New York Times - “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.”

‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks

With world leaders gathering in Madrid next week for their annual bargaining session over how to avert a climate catastrophe, the latest assessment issued by the United Nations said Tuesday that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously.

A gas flare at a Shell refinery in Norco, La. 

“The summary findings are bleak,” said the annual assessment, which is produced by the United Nations Environment Program and is formally known as the Emissions Gap Report. Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, further increasing their emissions last year.

The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

As if to underscore the gap between reality and diplomacy, the international climate negotiations, scheduled to begin next week, are not even designed to ramp up pledges by world leaders to cut their countries’ emissions. That deadline is still a year away. 

Read the story from The New York Times by Somini Sengupta - “‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks.”

Climate Special on The Drum

The Drum host Ellen Fanning is joined by Aylin Cunsolo, Tony Wood, Ketan Joshi, Anika Molesworth and Ewan Jones  to discuss warnings of a climate catastrophe.

They discuss how Australia stacks up globally, and can we be optimistic about the future?

Watch the “Climate Special” from The Drum on ABC TV.

Is 13 too young for my daughter to decide she doesn't want children?

I’ve always been open with my 13-year-old about the realities of climate catastrophe. She’s the sort of kid who asks questions and initiates difficult conversations. Since the recent UN released a 33-page report summarising the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) latest assessment, we’ve begun talking in terms of plans for the future. I don’t shield her from the facts. I've asked her whether she’s thought about not having children.

I fear my daughter has harder choices than us to make.CREDIT:

At her age, I wasn’t even aware of the concept of climate change. But she can’t afford the luxury of being blissfully ignorant. Time is running out. She performed in a play last year based on Derrick Jensen’s graphic novel As the World Burns. She’s painfully aware of the possibility that her children and grandchildren will have a harder time being alive. And the band-aid banalities coming from politicians and lobby groups are no solutions at all.

Read the story from the story from The Sydney Morning Herald by Katerina Cosgrove - “Is 13 too young for my daughter to decide she doesn't want children?”

Making the case for emergency climate action

As climate catastrophe looms ever closer, some opinion leaders still hold fast to the view that we must not mention the seriousness of our plight for fear of demoralising people.

But how could we explain to our children, in some dystopian future of runaway global warming, that we held back from telling the truth at a time when human action could still have made a difference? It’s time to talk honestly about the climate emergency and what we need to do to save human civilisation and the precious eco-systems on which we depend.

Read the story by Jane Morton from Climate Emergency - “Making the case for emergency climate action.”

A controversial coupling that could help cool the world

by Jo Romm



Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch -
activist and denier engaged.
 

So I don’t normally cover engagement notices. But on Tuesday, climate activist Jerry Hall and climate super-denier Rupert Murdoch announced their impending nuptials in one of his many newspapers.

This is one of the most unusual couplings since James Carville and Mary Matalin or Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts or James Inhofe and Barbara Boxer. OK, I made up that last one, but still.

I mean, we have the actress and model who had four children with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger (and who has argued “climate change is the biggest threat the world has ever seen”) getting engaged to the man Rolling Stone magazine labeled “The Disinformer” in a 2010 story naming the “The Climate Killers: 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb the climate catastrophe.”

Read the ClimateProgress story - “Rupert Murdoch Is Marrying A Climate Hawk.”

Ted Glick talks about avoiding worldwide climate catastrophe

by Ted Glick

W

Ted Glick.

hat is the relationship between organizing to slow, stop and reverse the climate crisis, a very big job with a very close deadline and organizing to bring together a unified movement against our oppressive system that links people concerned about climate, racial justice, women’s and LGBT rights, labor rights, peace, social and economic justice, equality and more?

Read Glick’s story - “How to Prevent Worldwide Climate Catastrophe”.