Anika Molesworth to 'Zoom' into Beneath the Wisteria on May 30

(Beneath the Wisteria supporter, Mik Aidt from Geelong's "The Sustainable Hour", has kindly tidied up the recording from the May 30 visit by Anika Molesworth showing only Anika's presentation, it's in two pieces, Part One and Part Two - thanks Mik)

A far western New South Wales farmer with an acute understanding of the climate crisis and how it impacts on those who work the land will be a guest at Shepparton’s Beneath the Wisteria on Saturday, May 30.

Far western New South Wales farmer, Anika Molesworth,
will "Zoom" into Beneath the Wisteria on Saturday, May 30.

Anika Molesworth will join the group at its monthly gathering via Zoom in an event starting at 11:00 am.

Anika splits her life between her family’s arid outback sheep station, her PhD crop trials in central NSW, and the lush and green rice paddies in Southeast Asia, where she works as a researcher in international agricultural development. 

She was awarded the 2015 Young Farmer of the Year, 2017 NSW Finalist for Young Australian of the Year, and most recently the NSW Young Achiever Award for Environment and Sustainability. 

Anika is a passionate advocate for sustainable farming, environmental conservation and climate change action. She helped form Farmers for Climate Action and connects land managers to researchers through her platform Climate Wise Agriculture in order to build resilience into farming communities.

She is also keenly interested in the conservation of natural and cultural heritage in farming communities and manages the International National Trusts Organisation’s Sustainable Farms program.

Anika has lived on and worked her family farm since she was 12 and was to be married on the property this year, but her plans for that moment were frustrated and postponed because of the Covid-19 dilemma.

A powerful array of speakers were assembled for February’s Nation Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne and Anika was among them.

Anika has been interviewed by the Shepparton-based podcast “Climate Conversations”. 

The Zoom, Beneath the Wisteria is free and will last for about an hour with Anika explaining a little about herself, how the climate crisis is impacting on farmers and what they can do to live with these never seen before changes to the climate. There will be time for questions.

The May 30 Zoom meeting featuring Anika can be accessed at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82326064674, the convenor, Robert McLean, can be phoned at 0400 502 199 or contacted via email at r.mclean7@icloud.com.

Climate change: Lack of action enough to make a mother weep

The climate crisis is back in the news, well, at least in the letters section of The Melbourne Age.

Writing about Mothers Day, one writer said:

“My girl will be 35 in 2050 and by scientific projections that future looks grim: frequent extreme weather events, such as our recent firestorms; soaring temperatures; extended droughts; ecosystem collapse; mass extinction; migration wars; fresh water and food shortages, unbreathable air and, well, it's enough to make a mother weep.”

Another asked: “Why can't we move from laggard to leader on climate change?”

Another questioned the idea of using fossil fuels to create hydrogen saying: “Invest in new hydrogen energy projects including those powered by fossil fuels is dumbfounding.”

Read the letters from The Age - “Climate change: Lack of action enough to make a mother weep.”

The Women Fighting to Save the World

As of 2019, the world could no longer deny we are in a climate crisis. 

It was the year we said enough is enough. Greta Thunberg became the embodiment of our outrage when she said, “How dare you!” to world leaders. I am confident that this year we will turn the corner. We have the climate solutions, and they come with endless benefits, from safer drinking water to more bike paths to new green jobs. We have work to do, but I know we can do it. We have to. Because climate change isn’t about just polar bears, remote locations, or the distant future. It’s about us, our families, our friends, and our health—today. This is the year we start winning the battle.

Read the story from Marie Claire - “The Women Fighting to Save the World.”

Study: global banks 'failing miserably' on climate crisis by funneling trillions into fossil fuels

The world’s largest investment banks have funnelled more than £2.2tn ($2.66tn) into fossil fuels since the Paris agreement, new figures show, prompting warnings they are failing to respond to the climate crisis.

JP Morgan Chase, the US banks Wells
 Fargo, Citi and Bank of America
dominate financing for fossil fuels,
accounting for nearly a third of the £2.2tn.

The US bank JP Morgan Chase, whose economists warned that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity last month, has been the largest financier of fossil fuels in the four years since the agreement, providing over £220bn of financial services to extract oil, gas and coal.

Analysis of the 35 leading global investment banks, by an alliance of US-based environmental groups, said that financing for the companies most aggressively expanding in new fossil fuel extraction since the Paris agreement has surged by nearly 40% in the last year.

Read the story from The Guardian by Patrick Greenfield and Kalyeena Makortoff -  “Study: global banks 'failing miserably' on climate crisis by funneling trillions into fossil fuels.” 

Climate activists’ perspectives on the coronavirus

Selfishness and greed among some members of the community can put us all in danger — and that’s no matter whether the issue is a virus crisis or a climate crisis. 

This corona crisis is not about whether you risk get infected by the virus. It is about our collective responsibility: Do we see ourselves as a part of society and act in a responsible, precautious manner in order to protect vulnerable groups and so that our healthcare system is relieved? Or don’t we?

Read the story from the Centre for Climate Safety by  Mid Aidt - “Climate activists’ perspectives on the coronavirus.”

£30bn pension fund: we'll sack asset managers that ignore climate crisis.

A £30bn British pension fund has threatened to sack investment managers that do not take action on the climate crisis, criticising the sector as “not fit for purpose”.

Protesters including Greta Thunberg at the World
 Economic Forum meeting in Davos on Friday.

Brunel Pension Partnership, which manages pension money for nine councils in south-west England as well as for the Environment Agency, said it would review the mandates of asset managers that don’t reduce exposure to climate risk by 2022.

The Bristol-based pension fund will demand that companies in which it invests take steps to align their emissions with targets agreed at the 2015 Paris climate summit. Brunel will vote against the reappointment of board members of companies that who are not doing enough, and could also sell its stakes from 2022 onwards.

Read the story from The Guardian by Jasper Jolly - “£30bn pension fund: we'll sack asset managers that ignore climate crisis.”

Explaining the myths surrounding the climate crisis.

Potholer54  explains the myths surround the climate crisis.

Who needs artists in a climate crisis?

Listen to Dr Jen Rae discuss “Who needs artists in a climate crisis?”

‘You have utterly no clue': why 'climate emergency' is Australia's ultimate outrage trigger

Earlier this year, Trudi Beck, a general practitioner from Wagga Wagga, wrote to councillors across New South Wales urging them to acknowledge the climate crisis and declare a local emergency.

Incredibly unsettling’: the November day that bushfires
 turned the sky orange over Port Macquarie. 

Some responses were positive. Others less so.

Mark Hall, a Lachlan shire councillor and Baptist pastor, told Beck: “Stick to medicine – you have utterly no clue about climate science. Your email intrusion is truly not welcome.”

So far, 84 jurisdictions in Australia covering about a quarter of the population – mostly cities and local government areas – have declared a climate emergency. The first elected body in the world to act, Darebin council in Victoria, is credited with starting a movement that is now supported by governments representing 800 million people worldwide, including the European Union and Bangladesh.

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “‘You have utterly no clue': why 'climate emergency' is Australia's ultimate outrage trigger.”

Leading scientists condemn political inaction on climate change as Australia 'literally burns’

Leading scientists have expressed concern about the lack of focus on the climate crisis as bushfires rage across New South Wales and Queensland, saying it should be a “wake-up call” for the government.

Firefighters battle a bushfire near Braidwood,
 New South Wales, on Friday. Scientists are
perplexed that as bushfires have intensified on
 Australia’s east coast, political commentary on
climate change has ‘very much died down’.

Climate experts who spoke to Guardian Australia said they were “bewildered” the emergency had grabbed little attention during the final parliamentary sitting week for the year, which was instead taken up by the repeal of medevac laws, a restructure of the public service, and energy minister Angus Taylor’s run-in with the American author Naomi Wolf.

Escalating conditions on Thursday and Friday led to dozens of out-of-control bushfires, including in the NSW’s Hawkesbury region, where a fire at Gospers Mountain merged with two other blazes burning in the lower Hunter on Friday.

Read the story from The Guardian by Lisa Cox - “Leading scientists condemn political inaction on climate change as Australia 'literally burns’.”

Climate crisis will not be discussed at G7 next year, says Trump official.

Donald Trump.

The climate crisis will not be formally discussed at the G7 summit in June next year, Donald Trump’s acting White House chief of staff said on Thursday.

“Climate change will not be on the agenda,” Mick Mulvaney told reporters, without elaborating.

Mulvaney announced that the 2020 summit of seven of the world’s most powerful industrialised countries will take place at the National Doral Miami, one of the president’s golf resorts in Florida, despite widespread ethics concerns and an ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump’s conduct.

From weakening regulation on vehicle emissions to blocking warnings about how coastal parks could flood and withdrawing funding for conservation programs, the Trump administration is accused of consistently ignoring, burying and undermining climate science.

Read the story from The Guardian by Emily Holden - “Climate crisis will not be discussed at G7 next year, says Trump official.”

Climate explained: why some people still think climate change isn’t real

At its heart, climate change denial is a conflict between facts and values. People deny the climate crisis because, to them, it just feels wrong.

Even people who accept the science of climate change
sometimes resist it because it clashes with their personal projects.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, acknowledging climate change involves accepting certain facts. But being concerned about climate change involves connecting these facts to values. It involves building bridges between the science of climate change and peoples’ various causes, commitments and convictions.

Denial happens when climate science rubs us up the wrong way. Instead of making us want to arrest the climate crisis, it makes us resist the very thought of it, because the facts of anthropogenic global heating clash with our personal projects. 

It could be that the idea of climate change is a threat to our worldview. Or it could be that we fear society’s response to climate change, the disruption created by the transition to a low-emissions economy. Either way, climate change becomes such an “inconvenient truth” that, instead of living with and acting upon our worries, we suppress the truth instead. 

Read the story from The Conversation by a Senior Researcher in Politics from the  Auckland University of Technology, David Hall -  “Climate explained: why some people still think climate change isn’t real.” 

The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

 ‘The war on the climate emergency, if correctly
waged, would actually be good for the economy’

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.

Read the story from The Guardian by Joseph Stiglitz - “The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response.”

Opinion: How to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist

The climate crisis has moved into everyday life and it can feel overwhelming.

Government reports have warned that the U.S.
 is already suffering the effects of climate change.

Hurricane Dorian, which left more than 70,000 people homeless, was an instance of this climate breakdown. A hotter ocean means stronger storms, a higher sea means worse flooding, a hotter atmosphere means more rain. Worsening wildfires in California and elsewhere, devastating flooding in our agricultural heartland, swaths of dead forest in the Rockies, the global collapse of coral reefs — these are just a few examples of the long and lengthening list of the catastrophic impacts of climate breakdown.

The evidence that human-caused global heating is dangerously disrupting Earth systems is unequivocal, and it no longer takes a scientist to see this. Denying this reality puts billions of lives at risk, and will surely come to be condemned by history.

Read the story from The Los Angeles Times by Peter Kalmus - “Opinion: How to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist.”

Big Ag Is Sabotaging Progress on Climate Change

Climate experts have sounded yet another dire alarm, this time aimed straight at our stomachs. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, on “Climate Change and Land,” warns that meeting the challenges of our climate crisis requires urgent changes in our food systems. Days after, as if to illustrate the point, news broke that cattle ranchers and soybean farmers in Brazil were torching the Amazon rainforest, the “lungs of the world,” to clear land for more industrial-scale fields. Grim as it is, the report may be overly optimistic because it doesn’t sufficiently address the power of agribusinesses.

Agrochemical giant Monsanto, which already sells half
of Malawi’s commercial corn seeds, is trying to prevent f
armers from saving seeds from their last harvests.

The IPCC identifies a range of impacts on land, water, and other natural resources, and offers a set of welcome if unsurprising recommendations to both reduce the contributions of our food systems to climate change and adapt to feed a global population expected to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050. They include: Stop draining wetlands to grow biofuels; reduce demand for beef and strengthen regulations to prevent deforestation in critical areas like the Amazon; cut food waste, which now squanders one-third of consumable food; reduce excessive fertilizer use; and improve cropping systems to turn croplands from heavy greenhouse-gas emitters to carbon sinks.

Read the story from Wired by Timothy A Wise - “Big Ag Is Sabotaging Progress on Climate Change.”

Australia’s carbon emissions rise again, largely thanks to LNG industry

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise despite the Morrison government claiming it is taking “sensible, responsible action” to address the climate crisis, the latest official data shows.

Part of the LNG projects in the north of Western Australia.
 The growth of the industry is primarily responsible for
 the recent rises in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

National emissions increased by 3.1m tonnes in the year to March to reach 538.9m tonnes, a 0.6% jump on the previous year, the report released on Friday revealed.

Carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation continue to decrease, reflecting the falling cost of solar and wind energy, but this is being more than cancelled out by the growth in emissions from the liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry, mostly in northern Western Australia. Emissions from LNG were up 4.7m tonnes over the year.

Read the story from The Guardian by Adam Morton -  “Australia’s carbon emissions rise again, largely thanks to LNG industry.” 

Pacific islands will survive climate crisis because they 'pick our fruit', Australia's deputy PM says

Pacific island nations affected by the climate crisis will continue to survive “because many of their workers come here to pick our fruit”, Australia’s deputy prime minister has said.

Michael McCormack 'annoyed' at calls to end
coal so Pacific islands 'can survive'.

Michael McCormack’s comments were made after critical talks at the Pacific Islands Forum that almost collapsed over Australia’s positions on coal and climate change.

Fears are growing the situation might come at a diplomatic cost for Australia in a region where China has become increasingly influential.

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Pacific islands will survive climate crisis because they 'pick our fruit', Australia's deputy PM says.”

The Republican Climate Closet

For a political party stocked with people who deny the seriousness of the climate crisis, the Republican Party does some curious things.

A group of teenage protesters, demanding action
on climate change, gathered in front of the White House in May.

Did you know, for instance, that a Republican Congress put an explicit price on emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide? That was in early 2018. Companies can now get a tax credit from the United States government as high as $50 a ton for pumping carbon dioxide into the ground, instead of emitting it into the air.

For years, Congress has also subsidized the installation of low-emission sources of electricity like solar panels and wind turbines, a policy that has helped scale the market and drive their cost down drastically. More recently, it has offered tax incentives for the purchase of electric cars, and their costs are falling, too. Some of these policies were originally adopted when Congress was controlled by the Democrats, but the Republicans declined to kill them in the years when they held both houses.

Read the story from The New York Times by Justin Gillis - “The Republican Climate Closet.”

Climate change: the facts - David Attenborough

The world stops when David Attenborough speaks, or so it seems.

The naturalist/TV host has long been concerned about what was once simply a climate issue, but has now become  a climate crisis; a crisis that is threatening the biodiversity of life on earth; a fascination that has held Sir David’s attention throughout his life.

He now sees the planet as being on the verge of climate catastrophe, discussing and illustrating his concerns through his latest television documentary, “Climate change: the facts”.

The documentary takes a look at one of the greatest challenges we face today, using intimate stories of people's lives; lives that are affected by climate change. 

Climate crisis reducing land’s ability to sustain humanity, says IPCC

The climate crisis is damaging the ability of the land to sustain humanity, with cascading risks becoming increasingly severe as global temperatures rise, according to a landmark UN report compiled by some of the world’s top scientists.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Para state. Stripping land
wholesale, for uses such as cattle farms and coffee
 plantations, can affect the climate which then affects
 the health of the land.

Global heating is increasing droughts, soil erosion and wildfires while diminishing crop yields in the tropics and thawing permafrost near the poles, says the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Further heating will lead to unprecedented climate conditions at lower latitudes, with potential growth in hunger, migration and conflict and increased damage to the great northern forests.

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “Climate crisis reducing land’s ability to sustain humanity, says IPCC.”