Australia just had its record warmest start to a year. Will winter turn it around?

Australia has just recorded its warmest start to a year, while the national water storage has fallen to its lowest level in five years at just 46.4 per cent of capacity. 

It has been a frosty lead-up, but what will winter proper hold?

We're not talking millennium drought levels just yet, but in Sydney water restrictions start from this weekend, and all capital city water storages are down from a year ago, bar Perth. 

Despite recent rain, and snow even in the past few days, soil moisture levels remain relatively low for large parts of the east and west coasts. 

So is this the winter when it could all turn around, when the skies open, the soil gets nicely damp and the dams fill?

The current outlook suggests not.

Read the ABC News story by Kate Doyle - “Australia just had its record warmest start to a year. Will winter turn it around?”

Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says

Five years since the Abbott government scrapped the Climate Commission, the environmentalist Tim Flannery says our energy policy remains hostage to lobbyists, political self-interest and “mad ideologues”.

‘We’re being held hostage at a federal level,’
Tim Flannery told Guardian Australia.

But the organisation Flannery helped start from the ashes of Abbott’s climate bonfire, the Climate Council, says that attitudes have shifted substantially since 2013 – at least those outside federal parliament.

“We’re being held hostage at a federal level,” Flannery told Guardian Australia.

“It has been a disgrace. Our failures are the failures of a small group of politicians who are supposed to be acting in the national interest. Instead, they’re using energy policy as a cudgel, they’re listening to paid lobbyists and doing their bidding.”

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Energy policy captive to lobbyists and 'mad ideologues', Tim Flannery says.”

‘The daughters lost everything': Why more Australians need to be prepared for disaster season

In her decade as an emergency volunteer for the Australian Red Cross, and five years as a volunteer firefighter, Amanda Lamont has responded to hundreds of disaster incidents – but one sticks out.

Amanda Lamont speaking with children after
 Tropical Cyclone Marcia in Queensland.

It was in January 2015, two days after a bushfire had torn through homes and livestock in Moyston, Western Victoria, and her Red Cross team had been called to a property that had been, in part, burnt to the ground.

Read the story from The Age by Casandra Morgan - “‘The daughters lost everything': Why more Australians need to be prepared for disaster season.”

Uncovering the Mental Health Crisis of Climate Chang

The young man believed he only had five years to live.

 “Not because he was sick,” said Kate Schapira, “not because anything was wrong with him, but because he believed that life on Earth would be impossible for humans.”

The sign on Schapira’s booth read: CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING 5¢ THE DOCTOR IS IN. Time to earn her pennies.

On that muggy June day, she had set up shop in Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Schapira is not a trained therapist — a fact she makes clear to visitors — but she is happy to chat with anyone suffering from anxiety about climate change. “A lot of what I do is listen and ask questions,” she said.

Read the Nexus Media story “By Jeremy Deaton - “Uncovering the Mental Health Crisis of Climate Change.”

Six reasons to be more optimistic about climate change than five years ago

There are reasons to be more optimistic about climate change now than five years ago, writes climate change economist Adam Whitmore. Several trends, including emissions reduction, carbon pricing or investment into low-carbon technologies, make it appear that the worst of the risks of climate change can be avoided. Courtesy Whitmore’s blog On Climate Change Policy 

A wind farm in Denmark.

I have now been writing this blog for just over five years, and it seems timely to step back and look at how the climate change problem appears now compared with five years ago.

In some ways, it is easy to feel discouraged. In the last five years, the world has managed to get through about a tenth of its remaining carbon budget, a budget that needs to last effectively forever.

However, in many ways, there seem to be reasons for much greater optimism now than five years ago. Several trends are converging that together make it appear that the worst of the risks of climate change can be avoided.

Read the story by Adam Whitmore from energypost - “Six reasons to be more optimistic about climate change than five years ago.”

Why are more trees dying along the Monaro Highway near the Snowy Mountains?

Almost five years after revealing images of vast swathes of dead trees on the Monaro were first published on these pages, queries about the extent of the tree graveyard continue to fill this column's inbox.

A typical vista of dead trees in the Monaro.

The widespread form of dieback which covers an area of over 2000 square kilometres and has resulted in thousands of gum trees, mainly Ribbon Gums (Eucalyptus viminalis), is especially noticeable alongside the highway between Cooma and Jindabyne, where in some spots it appears as if every tree is dead.

Read The Canberra Times story - “Why are more trees dying along the Monaro Highway near the Snowy Mountains?”

Replacing Liddell with renewables is $1.4 billion cheaper than government plan, report says

The Turnbull government's plan to keep the worn-out Liddell power station running for another five years would cost about $1.4 billion more than replacing it with clean energy, and spew millions of tonnes of damaging carbon pollution, a new analysis shows.

The Australian Conservation Foundation says
 replacing Liddell's capacity with clean energy
would be far cheaper and less polluting.

The findings cast further doubt on the wisdom of keeping Australia's oldest operating coal plant open beyond its slated closure in 2022, and have implications for the expected retirement of most existing coal-fired power stations within 15 years.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg in September ordered energy giant AGL to keep open the coal-fired plant for five extra years or sell it to a party that will.

The demand followed a report by the Australian Energy Market Operator that warned the closure of Liddell, in NSW's Hunter region, would leave a 1000-megawatt shortfall of "flexible, dispatchable" capacity, which is energy that can be created on demand.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Replacing Liddell with renewables is $1.4 billion cheaper than government plan, report says.”

'Brutal facts' will not wake people up to climate change

The brutality of facts is simply not enough to “wake people up” to the crushing realities of climate change.

Strangely, and perversely it is those very crushing realities that mentally and emotionally distance people from coming to terms with climate change.

To avoid such confrontations is as natural to humans as breathing and all of us inherently distance ourselves, if not physically then certainly intellectually, from anything foreign to that which will allow us to prosper.

Many people, in fact most of us, procrastinate and will embrace any doubt that will allow the preservation of what we prefer and climate change, whose reality is explained by a science, whose very clarity depends on doubt and questioning, is naturally one of those things about which we prefer not to think, and subsequently not take any action about.

Bloomberg tells us that the U.S. and European Union are pushing for a stronger explanation about the dangers of climate change and the consequences of failing to stem fossil-fuel emissions.

That is explained in a story headed: “Five years 2,000 scientists, how do you wake people up to climate change?”

The raw brutality of the science will not be enough, rather we need some sort of social movement that comes from the bottom-up and is embraced with equal enthusiasm by a top-down agreement.