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Non-viral news stories you may have missed

news-viral-fuel — Breaking news – some regional fuel suppliers accused of profiteering (not this one), charging $1.20 or more for a litre of unleaded petrol.

Even when the world is assailed by an invisible foe – a global pandemic – the ordinary news cycle continues. Not that you’d know it, with electronic and print media obsessed 24/7 with the virus and its long-term effect on the global economy. (That is, the economy has been seriously affected – not ‘impacted’, please- the latter referring to something jammed together, e.g. wisdom teeth. SWAG(SheWhoAddsGrammaticalNotes))

The Guardian Weekly has taken to presenting 15-20 news briefs badged “non-covid-19 news”. Unavoidably, about a third of these stories somehow manage to touch on the virus that stopped the world in its tracks. But at least they are trying to maintain perspective.

The mainstream media has not so much ignored standout news stories as relegated them well beneath the repetitive coverage of COVID-19.

For example, did you know that Australia’s Easter road toll was greatly reduced in 2020 compared with the four-day public holiday in 2019? Nationally, six people died on Australian roads, compared with 19 on Easter weekend 2019. The Northern Territory usually has the worst Easter road toll per capita, but this year joined Victoria and the ACT in recording zero deaths.

Over the Tasman, New Zealand reported zero deaths on the roads, compared with four last Easter and a record 17 in Easter 1990. That’s hardly surprising, given that New Zealand has been on Level Four lockdown.

Before the virus, stories about refugees and asylum seekers often led the news, or if not the news as we know it, definitely on social media.

The one news story that penetrated the mainstream news was the latest chapter in the three-year ordeal of a Tamil family seeking a safe haven in Biloela.

The family of four was living in ‘Bilo’ quite happily until March 2018, when the Department of Immigration removed them to detention in Melbourne and subsequently to Christmas Island. There have been numerous (failed) legal challenges to the Department of Home Affairs’ attempts to deport the family. The case came to public attention again last Friday when a last minute Federal Court injunction literally stopped the deportation flight on the tarmac at Darwin. The ABC reports the family will remain in Australia (at a Darwin hotel) until at least today. The Department of Home Affairs has repeatedly said the family does not meet Australia’s protection obligations. It is understood their visas expired in early 2018.

If anything positive came from COVID-19, it delivered a temporary reprieve for the planet, dramatically reducing traffic pollution in major cities.

The Guardian commissioned new data that estimates the global industrial shutdown will cut carbon emissions by 5%. Yes, global carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry could fall by 2.5 billion tonnes in 2020. That is the biggest drop on record.

Activist groups resisting the spread of coal seam gas and/or coal development in rural Australia have put their direct-action campaigns on hold, instead relying on social media for exposure.

The ‘Stop Adani’ campaign, which aims to thwart development of a major coal mine in Australia by an Indian company, claimed a ‘win’ this week.

Social media posts said engineering group FKG had pulled out of the second stage of the crucial rail link being built between the Carmichael mine and the Abbott Point export terminal. Stop Adani’s main thrust now is to put pressure on contracting companies to distance themselves from the controversial project. The next critical date is May 21, when insurance broker Marsh is set to decide on providing essential insurance coverage to Adani. Toowoomba-based FKG Group declined to comment on the Facebook posts.

Adani Australia said on Tuesday it was awarding the $220 million rail contract to Martinus Group. Adani Mining CEO Lukas Dow said anti-coal activists had failed to stop the project going ahead. “Their recent claims that contractors have pulled out of our project are false and we remain on track to create more than 1,500 direct jobs during the construction.”

Meanwhile, Arrow Energy’s 50/50 owners Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina announced a financial commitment to the first stage of a $2 billion coal seam gas (CSG) project in the Surat Basin. Queensland Premier Anastacia Palaszczuk predictably enough said positive things about the 1,000 jobs this project would create, describing it as “a milestone in Queensland’s economic recovery from covid-19”.

International news stories which did not receive the sort of coverage they did a year ago included the first anniversary of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.

The anniversary was commemorated on April 15, signalled by a lone bell tolling in locked down central Paris. Despite the chaotic state of the ruined cathedral and COVID-19 restrictions, a mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday and livestreamed to Catholics world-wide.

Work has been halted on the $1 billion cathedral restoration (funds pledged by 340,000 companies and individuals), not only because of COVID-19 but also because of lead contamination.

Also largely missing from the media radar was the first anniversary on March 15 of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Ten days later, the lone gunman charged with killing 51people and injuring more than 40 changed his plea to guilty. The plea saves relatives of those killed and injured from re-living the event through what would have been an international showcase trial.

Unless you subscribe to John Menadue’s blog collective Pearls and Irritations, you probably did not read Judith White’s take on the gutting of the Australia Council’s funding. Cuts announced in early April are the last of savage cuts made in the 2016 Budget and rolled out over four years.

As White reveals, those to lose multi-year funding include the Australian Book Review (Federally-funded for six decades), the Sydney Book Review, Overland magazine and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Small to medium creatives also affected included Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre and new music company Ensemble Offspring.

Speaking of the arts, Winton’s week-long outback film festival, usually held in June, has been postponed to September 18-26. A source said the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival would go ahead at that time if the government changes its rules about large gatherings.

You may have started watching the latest in the outback noir series, Mystery Road on ABC TV. The original Mystery Road movie was filmed in Winton, as was the sequel, Goldstone. The latest made-for-TV series, filmed in and around Broome and the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia, has a famous cast member. Swedish actress Sofia Helin, who played homicide detective Saga Norén in the cult series, The Bridge, was one of the first lead actors to portray someone with a form of autism.

In Mystery Road, Helin plays European archaeologist Professor Sondra Elmquist, digging for Aboriginal artefacts in a remote coastal location.

Apart from watching Grey’s Anatomy, we don’t watch 7 very often, but I did catch this snippet, tucked away at the bottom of an online news feed.

Australia’s oldest man, Dexter Kruger, quietly turned 110 on Monday, being characteristically optimistic when speaking to well-wishers at a (virtual) party held in his honour.

“My life has spanned a lot of years and I have touched seven generations of the Kruger family,” he said.

“I don’t know what else (to say), but I will invite you all to my next birthday.”

FOMM Back Pages: https://bobwords.com.au/climate-extremes-polar-vortex-bushfires/

Resolution: we all want to save the world

resolution-save-world — Image: Southern Downs Regional Council water-wise pamphlet

Blame it not on the Bossa Nova but on the ancient Babylonians, who, 4,000 years ago, invented the dubious practice of making New Year resolutions.

The Babylonians were the first to hold New Year celebrations, although held in March (when crops were sown).

The Babylonians pledged to pay their debts and return any borrowed objects (thinks: whoever borrowed Murakami’s ‘IQ84’ and Cohen’s ‘Beautiful Losers’, give them back!).

An article in <history.com> cites these rituals as the forerunner of our New Year resolutions.

“If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favour on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the good books -a place no one wanted to be.”

Off and on for at least 60 years I have been making promises to no-one in particular that I would turn over a new leaf (an idiom derived from the days when a page in a book was known as a leaf), thus, to start afresh on a blank page.

Adolescent resolutions included promising to keep my room tidy and stop acting on naughty thoughts (less I go blind).

As decades passed, these resolutions turned to more weighty matters: to drink less, give up smoking, spend more time with the kids – that sort of thing.

The stalwart English clergyman John Wesley took the Babylonian resolution to another level, inventing the Covenant Renewal Service, commonly held on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Time has eroded the ritual’s religious overtones and these days making New Year resolutions is a secular activity that ranks alongside taking photos of your restaurant meal and posting it on Instagram.

If you have serious reasons for making an ethical promise to yourself to stop doing this or that or indeed to actively do something for the good of humanity, then go for it.

My three global resolutions for 2020, the first year of a new decade (although there are those who insist the first year of the new decade is 2021), are for the most part geared to survival (of the planet),

On Monday I was in the Warwick Council offices (handing in the paperwork for my seniors’ rates discount). There was a pamphlet on the desk explaining how to limit water use to 80 litres of water per day.

The limit was dropped from 100 litres per person a few weeks ago, given the parlous state of the region’s dams and lack of substantial rainfall.

Our existing 1,500 litre rainwater tank has but one ring left after (a) someone left the hose on or (b) someone sneaked in and stole it – an ever-increasing risk in this region. Next week we are having a 5,000 litre tank delivered. In so doing, we will have the entire cost of the tank deducted from our next rates bill. We have to pay for a handyman to build a base and also pay the plumber, but those are small prices to pay for water security. Mind you, it will take several decent falls of rain to make an impression on a combined 6,500 litre capacity.

Southern Downs Regional Council helpfully produced a pamphlet (above) which explains at a glance how you can get through 80 litres of water in a day.

The hard habit to break is flushing the toilet after every use (12 litres per flush). Most people in the region have a Mellow Yellow policy in place, which is what you think it is.

Living in an area which has seen no decent rainfall in two years quickly makes one mindful of how we routinely waste water. Now we aim to save and recycle every drop. Water left in a pot after steaming vegies, for example, once cooled is poured under a tree.

If you had wondered, yes, you could be fined for using more than your quota. The water meter reader will find you out. Not only will you get charged more pro rata for water use, if there is a leak in the system on your property, you are responsible for repairing (and paying) for it.

The second resolution is to ensure I generate as little waste as possible. As you’d know, moving house employs a lot of cardboard, paper, bubble wrap and rolls of packing tape which, at the other end, refuse to give up their grim hold.

Three trips to local transfer stations (dumps) later, I can see the urgency in re-thinking my attitude to household waste and packaging. When packing up, I picked up a few Styrofoam boxes (with lids) from the local supermarket. They made for sensible packing of fragile electronic components and the like.

But once you no longer have a use for Styrofoam or bubble wrap, what then? The local transfer station 15kms outside Warwick has a special container for polystyrene. As we found when getting lost looking for green waste, it also has a pit for asbestos and dead animals. (Ed: that’s what we call a non-sequitur)

We did donate a stack of flattened out storage boxes and a box full of plastic bubble wrap to a friend who is moving to our new town in January. A generous gesture, or did we just handball our waste problem to someone else?

Resolution number three is to reduce our personal carbon footprint – a hard thing to do when you live an hour’s drive from the nearest large city. When we were doing the green nomad thing driving around Australia, we worked out our carbon emissions and converted them into dollars. Then we donated an equivalent amount to a Landcare/tree planting organisation.

So while we are still driving a petrol-fuelled vehicle, we‘ll continue to do that. Once the height of summer has passed and hopefully some rain has fallen, we’ll plant as many trees and shrubs as this small suburban block can take. There’s a plan for a pergola on the western side, upon which we will grow grapes and other edible vines. This will hopefully mitigate our enslavement to the fossil-fuelled vehicle.

Of these three big resolutions for 2020, managing personal waste is the biggest challenge. We already started a compost bin. You can freeze and bury meat scraps, allowing decomposition and worms to work their natural miracles (Ed: if you have a dog, do not do this).

Avoiding packaging when you go shopping for groceries is harder. First thing: take your kete* with you. Fill it with unwashed fruit and vegetables straight from the bins. Check them out and put them back in the kete. Avoid prepacked fruit and vegetables, especially sealed packets of salad greens. Use paper bags if you have to, but be sure to compost them when they get wet and soggy.

On the outskirts of this town, young people are making a go of a small organic produce farm – hard to do in a drought. The ‘office’ is a small air conditioned shed with a couple of fridges, a bench with a set of scales and a pad on which to work out the total of your purchases. You then put the cash in an honesty box or arrange an EFTPOS transfer with the owner. It goes without saying you have to bring your own bag or box.

One can only hope that people do the right thing and that this brave little enterprise survives these arid times.

Happy New Year and please note, apart from the automatic distribution of this blog, I am having a break from social media through January. Thanks to those who subscribed to the cause.

*Kete is a woven flax basket traditionally used by the New Zealand Maori

Bushfire smoke, dust storms and asthma

Bushfire-smoke-Brtisbane — Image: Bushfire smoke over Brisbane CBD from the Convention Centre, November 11, 2019. David Kapernick © David Kapernick Photography

Images of Brisbane shrouded in an asthma-inducing smoky haze on Monday reminded me of Queensland Ballet’s season launch in 2009. We had driven down for the matinee on a day when a massive dust storm was predicted. By the time we came out, the dust haze was so thick you could barely see the ABC headquarters across the road from the Lyric Theatre.

No doubt those of you who remember that were reliving it on Monday, only this time it was bushfire smoke, drifting in from all sides: NSW, the Sunshine Coast or from Cunningham’s Gap where the highway has been closed since Sunday .

ABC’s 7.30 report invited an air quality specialist on to the programme who judged Brisbane’s air quality on November 11 to be 6 times above the level when air pollution starts to cause problems for people with respiratory problems. On that day, air quality in Queensland’s capital city (population 2.28 million) was worse than China’s biggest city, Beijing (population 21.24 million).

We tend not to get such alarmist warnings on days when plain vanilla air pollution is bad. It is the obvious nature of bushfire smoke (the smell, the poor visibility, the 24/7 media attention), that raises it to public alert level.

The reason health authorities get worried about bushfire smoke in the atmosphere is that the fine particulate matter in the smoke is hazardous to health. Moreover, the longer it takes to clear, the more serious the risk of exposure becomes. Particulate matter known as P10 and P2.5 are harmful to humans and animals: other sources of these fine particulates include power stations, vehicles, aircraft, and dust from unsealed roads, residential wood fire smoke, bushfires and dust storms.

Brisbane’s topography doesn’t help – the city lies in a basin and is prone to temperature inversions, which trap polluted air. Many cities around the world share this fate. Temperature inversions happen when the air is warmer above the pollution that the air on the ground. The smog is trapped, to the detriment of inhabitants in cities including Beijing, Los Angeles, Chengdu, Lima, Milan and Mexico City.

Before we get into air pollution and air quality monitoring, let’s run a short history of asthma, for the benefit of the nine out of 10 lucky Australians who don’t suffer from it.

In 400 BC, Hippocrates came up with the Greek word for asthma (άσθμα), to describe noisy breathing, the characteristic wheezing which so often signals an asthma attack. Hippocrates (himself) was the first physician to link asthma to environmental triggers and specific, hazardous trades like metalwork.

In layman’s terms, asthma is describes the situation in which you can breathe in but have difficulty breathing out. Someone in the throes of a bad asthma attack is over-inflating their lungs, quite possibly making it worse by hyperventilating.

Medically, it is described as a narrowing of the airways, usually averted by the administering of an inhaled bronchodilator medication or a steroid-based preventer.

Patients presenting at emergency departments with severe asthma are often put on a nebuliser, a machine which administers an inhaled bronchodilator through a mask worn over the mouth and nose. As I recall, last time I was on a nebuliser (when suffering anaphylaxis), relief was rapid and restorative.

Excuse me if I sound really old, but I recall taking tablets for asthma, before inhalers became commonly prescribed. In the 1940s and 50s, asthmatics were either given epinephrine injections (adrenaline) or aminophylline tablets. As I recall, the latter made me jittery, wakeful and a bit weird, although childhood friends would tell you I was like that already.

Statistics maintained by Asthma Australia reveal the burden of the disease on individuals, their carers and Australia’s health system. The cost of the disease, measured by its long-term impacts, was $28 billion in 2015 ($11,740 per person).

In 2017-208, there were 38,792 hospitalisations in which asthma was the main diagnosis; 44% were for children aged 14 or younger,

People with asthma are more likely to report a poor quality of life, but medical practitioners now are more pro-active about encouraging patients to have an asthma plan. But more needs to be done, with fewer than one in five asthmatics aged 15 and older having a written plan.

bushfire-smoke-astham — Bushfire smoke at Yangan, drifting in from Spicer’s Gap. Photo by Bob Wilson

(Note to self: this includes you, Bob. Make sure you have a spare puffer for times when (a) the puffer runs out (b) you have lost or misplaced it or c) the air looks like this).

The rate of deaths from asthma has remained stable since 2011. There were 441 deaths due to asthma in 2016-2017.

Mortality rates are higher for people living in remote or lower socioeconomic areas, and for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Meanwhile, parts of Queensland and NSW remain shrouded in bushfire smoke. Numerous scientists and firefighters have voiced concerns that this may only be the beginnings of a long, dry and bushfire-prone summer. Climate change-denying pollies bewilderingly blamed the Greens for conspiring to limit hazard reduction burns. Cathy Wilcox brilliantly summed this up in a four frame satirical cartoon (2^nd one down the page).

The Guardian took the fact-checking route.

On November 11, the World Air Quality Index rated several areas of Brisbane including Rocklea, South Brisbane, Woolloongabba, Wynnum, Wynnum West, Lytton and Cannon Hill as ‘very unhealthy’.

The state’s chief health officer Jeannette Young told the ABC that everyone should stay indoors for the next 24 to 48 hours.

“Treat this seriously and don’t be complacent. Whether you’re in Logan or Lowood or anywhere in between, everyone needs to limit time spent outdoors while these conditions remain,” Dr Young said.

The term “particulate matter” – also known as particle pollution or PM, describes the extremely small solid particles and liquid droplets suspended in air. PM can include soil dust and allergens and their size affects their potential to cause health problems.

PM10 refers to particles with a diameter of 10 micrometres or less (small enough to pass through the throat and nose and enter the lungs).

PM2.5 refers to smaller particles able to enter the blood stream, causing serious adverse health effects over time.

So what’s ‘normal’ and how does that compare to Remembrance Day in Brisbane? The World Health Organisation (WHO) says the average PM2.5 level of cities across the globe measured over a 24-hour period is 35µg/m (or 3.5 micrograms per cubic metre). An ideal level of pollution (no negative health impacts), is 25µg/m.

The Brisbane CBD was at a PM10 and 180µg/m at 9:00am on Monday – 10 times the amount of pollution on an average day.

As we so often blithely say: ‘it’s a first-world problem’.

The WHO estimates that 1.6 million people die every year in India from air pollution. India has some of the most polluted cities in the world. This report from the BBC attributes air pollution in Delhi to motor vehicles, construction and industrial emissions, the burning of crop stubble and the residue of fireworks set off for a Hindu festival.

In early November P2.5 levels in Delhi were seven times higher than Beijing in early November, the report said.

If you were paying attention, those comparisons also applied to Brisbane on Remembrance Day, 2019. Lest we forget.

Further reading: https://blissair.com/what-is-pm-2-5.htm

https://bobwords.com.au/whipping-dust-storm/

Where there’s (bush) fire there’s smoke

Oops- the tail light is out- better get that fixed! Fast forward to King St. Mechanical in Warwick. John came out and promptly fixed it- ‘No worries, mate. No charge’! It would have been the perfect introductory day in a new town, had it not been for the pall of bushfire smoke hanging over Warwick and communities to the east. At Yangan, 18 kms East, smoke from two fires burning in inaccessible country around Swanfels infiltrated the town. Residents closed windows and doors and tried to stay indoors as much as possible.

A tired looking bush fire brigade chap having a cold ale at the local pub told me he’d never seen it as bad in this district, Yangan and Swanfels were not alone. As today’s photo attests, the fires are still burning. It is probably overkill, but we have packed an emergency evacuation bag.

Bushfires, grass fires and controlled burns that got out of control have been burning all over South- East Queensland and Northern New South Wales for weeks. When we drove from Maleny to Warwick via the Lockyer Valley, the mercury peaked at 40 degrees Celsius, which even a Kiwi could tell you is unseasonably hot for Queensland in early October. The Lockyer Valley, ostensibly the region’s premier vegetable producing centre, looked brown and dead, bar a few irrigated fields. Up in the hills, fires were burning. A friend rang us while we driving through Ma Ma Creek.

“Why are you in the Lockyer Valley? Don’t you know there are fires burning and you need to leave there at once!”

We saw the smoke plume to which she referred and had heard on the radio news that a house was destroyed in Laidley.

So we kept on driving and emerged on the Toowoomba-Warwick road, just as a blood red sun was setting behind a shroud of smoke.

People who know about such things were predicting a long hot summer and an early start to the ‘bushfire season’ back in August.

As Yangan residents fretted and waited for a possible call to evacuate, I mentally prepared an emergency kit: phone, charger, keys, wallet, essential medications, scrips, passports, journal and pen, change of clothes, water bottle, dog food (and bowl). Strange feeling it is to compress one’s life into one essential package.

This is second nature for residents of Australia’s more bushfire-prone areas such as the Blue Mountains and the uplands of northern New South Wales.

The Guardian’s Lisa Martin wrote that fire authorities were bracing for a challenging bushfire season across the continent. The Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre’s seasonal outlook warned six States they faced ‘above-normal’ potential fire threat because of very warm and dry conditions and below average rainfall.

Queensland and New South Wales bore the brunt of it in September, when gusty winds and high temperatures fanned relatively small grassfires into uncontrollable bush fires. In Southern Queensland and Northern NSW, fire authorities dealt with 1,200 fires in the first two weeks of September, with 130 fires erupting in just one day. Fifty-five homes were lost and the iconic Gold Coast hinterland tourism attraction, Binna Burra Lodge, was destroyed.

Travel journalist Lee Mylne wrote about the determination of Binna Burra’s owners to rebuild. Amidst the rubble, the bell which hung in the lodge dining room since1934 has been found intact – a symbol of hope, Lee wrote.

The adjacent campground and café was spared and the Binna Burra board says it plans to open for Christmas holidays. It is also hoped the Sky Lodges can be repaired in time for the summer holidays.

Coincidentally, I am reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, a blunt instrument of a book which beats you about the head with unassailable facts and frightening scenarios about what will happen to our bodies as the planet warms. So I was more sharply concerned to read an ABC story yesterday which asserts that Australia is not prepared for what lies ahead. Key points of the story are:

The national aerial firefighting centre (NAFC) still awaits a Federal Government decision about its urgent request two years ago for $11 million in funding;
The Government has not guaranteed funding for the only national body researching the future of bushfires;
Emergency services experts who asked the Government to consider the threat of climate change in fire planning have not received a response.

Australia’s former chief scientist, Ian Chubb, said it was clear the climate was changing.

“It’s not just some passing phase that it didn’t rain this decade,” he said. “The implications of that for fire are pretty obvious.”

Recent fires in NSW ushered in a new phenomenon in firefighting dubbed Black Swan events. This describes what happens when a bush fire has reached such a point of ferocity that it interacts with extreme weather events.

The Sir Ivan fire near Dunedoo burned through 55,000 hectares, creating its own thunderstorm about seven kilometres high, according to a report by the NSW Coroner’s Court. Clouds of smoke shot lightning bolts up to 80 kilometres away, starting more fires.

Emergency experts and senior scientists have told a joint ABC investigation that a comprehensive national plan is needed to tackle the fires of the future. They are concerned about the lack of financial commitment from the Federal Government for resources and research.

The ABC’s Background Briefing cited documents that show the proportion of federal funding for NAFC has more than halved since 2003. Minister for Natural Disaster and Emergency Management David Littleproud said he would raise the business case at the next Ministerial Council meeting.

“We haven’t made a decision around the aerial assets,” he told Background Briefing. “We’ll continue to work with the states in a mature way.”

Mr Littleproud told Background Briefing the Government did acknowledge the role climate change had played in escalating fire risks.

“I haven’t seen this in my life before and I don’t know where it’s going to end,” he said. “I think it would be remiss of anybody not to suggest that it is not climate change that has caused a lot of this.”

As I write, a storm has brought decent rainfall to the Yangan district, which should help firefighters no end. Nevertheless, given my asthmatic tendencies, I’m staying indoors today, curled up with a good book. The choices are (a) persevere with The Uninhabitable Earth or (b) Carl Hiaasen’s Stormy Weather, a satirical yarn about a couple of con artists trying to capitalise on the aftermath of a hurricane sweeping through Florida.

In Chapter two of Wallace-Wells’s book he reminds us about a deadly European heatwave in 2003 which killed as many as 2,000 people per day. On page 47 he cites research that by 2050, 255,000 people are expected to die from direct heat events. Already a third of the world’s population is subject to deadly heat waves on at least 20 days of the year. Blimey, so let’s hope the old folk’s home has air conditioning for 101-year-old me.

Meanwhile in chapter five of Stormy Weather, a Rhesus monkey has stolen Max’s video camera, on which he had filmed the aftermath of the hurricane (with the aim of selling footage to a TV station).

His new bride, Bonnie, who is beginning to go off her exploitative husband (who has mysteriously vanished), is befriended by a strange fellow scouring the Everglades for (escaped) monkeys.

It’s no contest, really.

FOMM back pages, August 2017:

https://bobwords.com.au/bushfires-burning-hot-early/

Climate debate burning fiercely

bushfires-burning-climate — Peregian bushfire image by Rob Maccoll

As we prepared to move from the Sunshine Coast hinterland after 17 years, the air was full of bushfire smoke, dust and haze from an early, hot start to spring. It blew a gale up there for the best part of a week; strong south-westerlies, the last thing you need in an early bushfire season.

Multiple properties were lost around Stanthorpe and in the Gold Coast hinterland between Sarabah and Canungra as hot gusty winds sent bushfires out of control.

We all know how dry it has been around the Southern Downs and across the border in towns like Tenterfield and Armidale. The aforementioned towns join Stanthorpe and Warwick and at least six other regional New South Wales towns at risk of running out of water.

I recall being sent on assignment to Warwick in 1992 with a Courier-Mail photographer. We walked along the dry bed of the Condamine River with then mayor Bruce Green, commenting on the sparse pools of water here and there. The town’s main water supply, Leslie Dam, was at 3% capacity at the time.

In January 2011, I was marooned in Warwick. So much rain fell authorities had no choice but to open all seven floodgates on the Leslie Dam. Creeks rose and the main roads to Brisbane and Toowoomba were closed.

People who have at least one foot in the climate change denial camp will tell you it was always thus in Australia: floods, droughts, bushfires, insect swarms, dust storms and sometimes all five inside a few months.

The key differences between the long-lasting droughts of the late 1800s and what is happening now is a notable rise in average temperatures.

The CSIRO, the nation’s pre-eminent science organisation, states that Australia’s climate has warmed by just over 1C since 1910. Eight of Australia’s top ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2005.

University of Melbourne PhD researcher Mandy Freund and colleague Benjamin Henley studied climatic changes in Australia by studying seasonal rainfall patterns over an 800-year period.

“Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years.

“This new knowledge gives us a clearer understanding of how droughts and flooding rains may be changing in the context of a rapidly warming world”.

The debate between those who accept what 97% of the world’s scientists are telling us and the contrarians who think it is a left wing plot is increasingly polarising people.

The Australian, our only national newspaper, has kept up a steady flow of news stories and opinion articles which by and large support the views of those in denial about climate change. Similar views are consistently espoused by Sky News and populist radio shock jocks. Some would say that it is a good thing someone is putting the other side of the story.

What the Guardian Weekly now terms the “climate crisis” is well and truly on the agenda today with Strike4Climate, a globally coordinated series of rallies to emphasise the gravity of the situation.

The main idea is to support teenagers who have taken the day off school to protest. They, after all, will be the generation left to clean up problems left by their parents’ and grand-parents’ generations. The international protest movement was started by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. She called on school students who have concerns about inaction over climate change to go on strike and support climate rallies.

Given the increasingly strident coverage of climate change news and opinion from the both sides, it isn’t hard to mount an argument for having both points of view up for public debate, although you need a subscription to The Australian to read its coverage.

So let me summarise an opinion piece, forwarded to me by a reader.

On July 8, New Zealand geologist David Shelley refuted climate activist assertions that temperatures are at record highs, glaciers and sea ice are melting at unprecedented rates, and sea levels rising dangerously.

“A cursory examination of the geological literature shows that the first two assertions are simply not true, and that rising sea levels are par for the course.

“To assert that today’s temperatures are record highs is mischief-making of the highest order. Earth has been much hotter (up to 10C hotter) for the vast majority of geological time”.

Shelley goes on to say that sea levels were also significantly higher in the last interglacial 125,000 years ago.

“Florida Keys, for example, is the remains of a coral reef that grew then”.

David Shelley’s views are moderate compared to those of the Top 10 climate deniers.

Brendan Demelle, executive director of DeSmog, lists names including Fred Singer, Christopher Monkton and Bjorn Lomborg. Demelle says many climate change deniers start their pronouncements with: “I’m not a scientist, but…”

(Lord) Monkton, a former UK politician with a degree in the classics once said: “global warming will not affect us for the next 2,000 years, and if it does, it won’t have been caused by us.”

Did I suggest the debate between believe and don’t believe is getting more strident? Environmentalist Tim Flannery went so far this week as to suggest that ‘predatory’ climate change deniers are “a threat to our children”.

A despairing Flannery now admits that his 20 years of climate activism has been ‘a colossal failure’.

“Each year the situation becomes more critical. In 2018, global emissions of greenhouse gases rose by 1.7% while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by 3.5 parts per million – the largest ever observed increase.

“No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution”.

On Tuesday, The Conversation’s Misha Ketchell announced a surprise ban on those promoting climate denial views through the portal.

“The editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics,” he wrote. “Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts”.

“We believe conversations are integral to sharing knowledge, but those who are fixated on dodgy ideas in the face of decades of peer-reviewed science are nothing but dangerous”.

The Australian’s Chris Kenny said The Conversation’s decision was a fundamental assault on freedom of speech and intellectual integrity.

“This action flies in the face of scientific endeavour, where the scientific method is founded on the presumption of rigorous scepticism”, he wrote.

Kenny added: “The Conversation was founded with taxpayers’ support and still relies heavily on the involvement of publicly-funded universities. This is taxpayers’ money used for the silencing of dissent and the deliberate shrinking and censoring of scientific, academic, environmental, economic and political debate”.

“Who will decide what level of scepticism is acceptable?”

The user-friendly website Skeptical Science (getting skeptical about global warming skepticism) should help clarify that question. The website lists 100+ common climate change myths, matching each one with the scientific facts.

I encourage you all to do your own research into this most urgent of issues. As the Joan of Arc of climate change Greta Thunberg said last year: “I want you to act as if our house is on fire, Because it is’.

Due to unforeseen circumstance I am unable to attend the Brisbane rally. I guess they’ll start without me!

Global Insights On Neglected Political Issues

There have been issues aplenty for people to mull over ahead of tomorrow’s Federal election, not all of them as obvious as climate change, refugees or the Murray Darling.

Chair of Australia21, Paul Barratt, named those issues as his top three in a contribution to John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations newsletter. But he also added 10 neglected political issues. They include inequality, reversing the cuts to research and development, early childhood education and a world-class NBN. Barrett, a former Departmental secretary of Defence and Primary Industries and Energy, would be aware of the global statistics on internet speed. Increasing the latter is, after all, the main aim of a world-class NBN.

A report in the Canberra Times last month showed that Australia dropped three places to 62nd for fixed broadband. The latest Ookla Speedtest Global Index showed that Australia is far behind many comparable economies and a few developing nations. The download speed of 35.11 Mbps recorded for March is only 60% of the global average of 57.91 Mbps.

However, a spokesman for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield told the Canberra Times Ookla didn’t measure the speeds of which the NBN is capable.

“It measures the speed packages that households purchase – which is the main determinant of speeds received.” The spokesman said around half of the 5.1 million people connected to the NBN had chosen 25 Mbps or lower, eschewing the faster options.

Australians not yet connected to the NBN network are limited to an average speed of 8 Mbps with an ADSL connection (by way of explanation if I have not replied to your emails).

Barrett points out that faster internet is not just about downloading films or online gaming; it is about the needs of industry in the city and the bush as well as social benefits like remote delivery of medical services.

Coal and climate change

Whether you believe that climate change is the only real issue in this election or not, Australia is demonstrably dragging the chain in terms of mitigation. This is without a doubt the No 1 neglected political issue.

Australia is performing worse than most other advanced countries in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The global SDG Index ranked Australia 37^th in the world (down from 26^th last year and behind most other wealthy countries including New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Efforts to sway the country away from its love-affair with fossil fuels have struggled against the incumbent government’s determination that ‘coal is good for humanity’. There’s no doubt about the growing demand for coal to generate electricity in China and India and there’s no shortage of players, including Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, poised to open up new mines in the Galilee Basin. It’s not hard to figure out why. Australia exported $US47 billion worth of coal – 36.9% of global trade in 2018. Demand for thermal coal to fuel power stations is highest in China, the US and India. New coal-fired power stations planned by those three nations total 334,773MW of capacity – an increase of about 23%. Research portal carbonbrief.org exposes the folly of this, saying that CO2 emissions from existing plants alone are enough to ‘breach the carbon budget’ limiting global warming to1.5 or 2C.

The good news, if you are a climate change believer, is that 14 countries (including the UK and Canada), have signed up to phase out coal power generation by 2030.The Stop Adani campaign had its genesis in 2007 when environmental campaigner Tim Flannery alerted people to the likelihood of the Galilee Basin in central west Queensland being exploited. The arguments against development of the 27 billion-tonne thermal coal resource include the low quality of Galilee Basin coal, a required expansion of an export port too close to the Great Barrier Reef for comfort and the environmental record of the applicant (Adani).

As the above infographic explains in detail, there are concerns about the amount of water required to operate (a) the mine and (b) the port. The Indian coal and power company has posted a rebuttal of claims that it will take 12 gigalitres of water from the Great Artesian Basin.

Refugees and border paranoia

The United Nations Association of Australia set out its position on refugees and asylum seekers in April last year, saying that current policies and measures need to be reviewed.

“Australia’s current policy only shifts the problem to other countries.”

“Australia’s reputation as a welcoming host country and as a responsible global citizen is diminished by our current treatment of asylum seekers and refugees arriving spontaneously, as evidenced by arguments from within the Australian community and from the UNHCR. There are alternatives.”

The UNAA states the obvious – processing arrivals offshore is not cost-effective. Between 2012 and 2016, the cost to Australia was an estimated $9.6 billion. Though costs have reduced as arrivals have decreased, the estimated cost of offshore processing for 2017-18 was $714 million.

(Offshore processing costs blew out by 52% during 2018-19. The latest Budget records that estimated actual spending in 2018-19 on offshore processing will be $1.158 billion – Ed)

Despite the weight of international criticism, Australia has persisted with the practice of detaining refugees offshore and turning boats around.

It is important to know that the Labor Party has largely promised to maintain the status quo, although it would look at New Zealand’s offer to resettle refugees from Manus and Nauru,

Australian expat musician James Fagan, who has been living in the UK for 20 years, has often had to wear criticism of Australia’s refugee policies.

But he is being asked less often, since the Brexit campaign revealed what he called the “dark underbelly of xenophobia and racism in the UK”.

“Five or 10 years ago, when Tampa and all that stuff was in the news, I used to get a lot of questions in the UK. The one that sticks in my mind was the Armenian delicatessen owner who asked me about how I felt about my homeland’s treatment of refugees. He had Armenian friends and relatives in Australia and had been following the Tampa situation closely. He asked me if I was embarrassed. I said yes!

“But I’ve stopped being asked the question and the sad truth of it is that the longer a country persists in a particular course of action, the less it becomes newsworthy.”

Which brings us to No 10 in Paul Barratt’s list of neglected political issues – the need for empathy and compassion in government.

“It should be a matter of conscious public policy that empathy and compassion underpin everything we do in the public sphere,” he writes.

“Recent Royal Commissions have demonstrated how strongly human motivations drive behaviour. Humans have a powerful competitive and acquiring motivation, which tends to turn off other motivational systems that link to caring and supporting others.

“So developing a compassionate mindset is important because it has shown that this mind-set organises our motives, emotions and actions in ways that are conducive for our own and other people’s wellbeing.”

“Recognising the needs and aspirations of every human being necessarily implies refraining from demonising any social group – refugees, the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, etc.”

Mr Speaker, I commend the Mindful Futures Network to the House (and the Senate).

(The above quote could well have come from the late ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Valé to a great Australian politician who was respected by both sides of politics. SWETB) (SheWhoEditsThisBlog)

More reading – what Labor and the Greens were saying about a coalition before the 2016 election. https://bobwords.com.au/greens-coalition-bridge-far/

Three (Political) Billboards Outside Caboolture, Queensland

political-billboards-Queensland — Billboards outside Caboolture, Queensland and all the way to Canberra

A week before Easter, I was driving back from Bribie Island when my travelling companion pointed out the first of three political billboards. The first read: “Don’t Vote Labor”. A little further down the road: “If Shorten wins, you lose.”

The third billboard featured the face of a minor party leader known for her dubious skill in empathising with those in the community who have a morbid fear of ethnic minorities.

“I’ve got the guts to say what you’re thinking,” the political billboard states.

As much-quoted advertising guru Todd Sampson said on Twitter: How do you say racism without being racist? It’s surprisingly clever…

That’s not an endorsement, I’m sure, just an adman’s view of what works.

My passenger said: “Don’t they have to say who authorised those billboards?” I didn’t see anything.”

That’s the problem with advertising on billboards – the message has to be extremely pithy and in letters big enough to be read from a car passing by. The driver has only a few seconds to take in the message; no chance to read and absorb the small print which, as required, must state the name, affiliation and domicile of the person authorising the advertising.

These political billboards were sighted in the seat of Longman, which was wrested from the LNP with a 4.73% swing by Labor member Susan Lamb in 2016. After the dual-citizen fracas, Lamb resigned from the seat but won it back again at a by-election in July 2018.

Longman includes the satellite suburbs of Caboolture and Morayfield and the retirement communities of Bribie Island. High pre-poll support for One Nation had highlighted Longman as the electorate to watch, but on the day, Labor held the seat against the LNP with a two-party preferred swing of 3.7%.

One Nation was third on the ballot with some 14,000 votes. Perhaps it was the inclusion of six minor parties and an independent alongside the four main contenders that did the damage, but the LNP lost support.

As The Conversation observed at the time, the Coalition’s by-election primary vote plunged 9.4% in Longman, compared with the 2016 election. The 3.7% swing against the LNP’s Trevor Ruthenberg vindicated election analysts’ warnings about the reliability of single-seat polling.

“While senior Coalition MPs have since put this down to an ‘average’ anti-government swing at by-elections, few in the party would have expected such a kicking in a historically conservative seat,” wrote Chris Salisbury, Research Associate at the University of Queensland.

As Salisbury warned, by-election results should not be extrapolated to likely voting patterns at a general election. But those three billboards outside Caboolture, might, I suggest, be a warning to the local sheriff to watch her back (cultural reference to a 2017 movie by Martin McDonagh, starring Frances McDormand).

As we set off the following week on a circuitous back roads journey to Canberra, I inevitably began noticing billboards, As a rule, billboards positioned outside rural towns advertise food, accommodation, fuel and agricultural products. Sometimes you will see a religious message and on occasions a hand-made billboard damning fracking or coal mining. But a month out from a Federal election, it was no surprise to see political billboards as parties ramping up their profiles.

One of the most common billboards we spotted on the road proclaimed “Unsee This”, which turned out to be a house ad for a billboard company with space to rent.

As you’d imagine, advertising your wares on the side of the highway is an expensive business. Most billboard companies offer a 28-day minimum ‘lease’.

A campaign source told me it cost about $10,000 a month for a billboard and $16,000 for a mail-out to the electorate. So all up a major candidate is up for $60k to $100k for a Federal campaign

United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer estimated he has spent $50 million on various forms of election advertising, including ubiquitous billboards featuring the man himself with upstretched arms. The original pitch was “Make Australia great”, but UAP has swung away from that slogan to wordy headlines about fast trains and zonal taxing.

One of my musician friends who drove through New England on her way home from Canberra spotted a Barnaby Joyce billboard in a field. She seemed surprised, maybe assuming that after the former deputy leader’s fall from grace in 2018, he might have quit politics for good.

But no, Barnaby Joyce is once against contesting the seat of New England for the National Party, seemingly unbeatable in an electorate where he holds a 16% majority. As one of the best-known politicians for the wrong reasons, Barnaby doesn’t really need to pay to have his face recognised in the electorate.

Inverell farmer Glenn Morris, while not running for New England or putting his face on a billboard, nonetheless attracted a lot of media attention. He put climate change firmly on the agenda with a five-day horseback ride over the Anzac Day weekend. Morris and his horse Hombre rode from Glenn Innes to Uralla, wearing a drizabone raincoat with the words “Climate Action” on the back, urging voters to consider the environment in the upcoming election.

“This is an urgent message. We need climate action, we need our leaders to step up and we also need our community to demand more from our leaders,” Morris told the Northern Daily Leader

“I’ve watched too many elections come and go while I’ve been researching climate change, with no emphasis at all on the environment.”

That much is certainly true, with The Guardian saying that the partisan climate debate, characterised by hyperbole and misinformation, had paralysed Australian politics for a decade.

Labor is promising stronger policy which the Coalition has merrily dubbed “Carbon Tax 2.0”, claiming it will impose a massive regulatory burden on Australia.

As you may have read, among a long list of measures, Labor wants to set a higher emissions reduction target (45% by 2030, compared with the LNP’s 26%), reintroduce the Coalition’s abandoned National Energy Guarantee, launch a carbon credit scheme for heavy polluters, and implement strict vehicle emission standards.

As The Guardian rightly points, out, this is policy which may not even happen, despite Labor’s best intentions. “The Coalition is not showing any sign of having a substantial conversion on climate change. Labor will likely need the Greens to get various changes legislated and the Greens will want a higher level of ambition than is evident in this policy.”

As is apparent from its strong advocacy against new coal mines, The Greens will want Labor to exit coal sooner than later.

So even though many lobby groups are wont to call this the ‘climate change election’ it is entirely possible the long-running ideological deadlock will continue, with little or no change.

Sweden’s teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg says she wants adults to behave as if their house is on fire.

Unfortunately, the ‘adults’ in Canberra appear to have taken the batteries out of their smoke alarms so they can char their T-bone steaks with impunity.

For those who just joined us here at Friday on My Mind, yesterday was our fifth birthday! Give me a week to cogitate about that and next week we will have a completely subjective review of five years’ of FOMM. For now, enjoy the first episode, and, if you got up early on Wednesday to Dance up the Sun, good for you.

A Few Observations About Ice and Glaciers

ice-glacier-climate-change — Fox Glacier image by Cath Singleton

One Thursday night while watching rugby league, I went to the freezer, extracted some ice cubes and wrapped them in a tea towel. The aim was to encase my throbbing thumb in an icy blanket of numbness.

It’s just arthritis, the doctor said, examining the swelling of the thumb joint. Gardening, playing guitar and driving tends to bring on the pain and swelling. Importantly, the doctor did not recommend ice, instead suggesting anti-inflammatories (tablets or gel).

For athletes the world over, ice has for decades been part of the treatment for swelling and pain brought on by sporting injuries. It was quite a revelation, then, to discover that ice no longer has the imprimatur it once had for treatment of bruises and sprains. It seems that doctors and physiotherapists now believe that moving the injured body part helps more with recovery than numbing it with ice.

To digress for a moment, a Deloitte survey of media and entertainment habits cited here a few weeks back found that 91% of survey participants multi-task while watching TV. I scoffed at the time, then started thinking about the things I was doing while ‘watching’ footie.

The ritual of icing my thumb expanded into googling (on my phone) all manner of references to ice (frozen water) as a future FOMM took shape. I may have toyed with my crossword book (seven down: a permanent mass of ice caught in a mountain pass).

I may also have left-handedly replied to two texts and three emails while watching the Brisbane Broncos make multiple mistakes, run sideways, miss tackles and wonder why they got beaten.

When it comes to ice and rugby league, you often footie players sitting forlornly on the bench with bags of ice strapped to their shoulders, knees, thighs or ankles. The most common rugby league injury is what is euphemistically known as a ‘cork’ which is what we kids used to call an ‘Uncle Charlie’, that is, when the schoolyard bully knees you in the thigh muscle. The result is extreme pain, as a deep-seated bruise takes shape within the traumatised tissue.

You will notice I have reclaimed the original definition of ice (the solid form of water). It takes this form when subjected to temperatures of zero and below. In contemporary culture, ice is most frequently used to serve chilled drinks and to create temporary fridges at large family gatherings.

The times when ice (frozen water) most often makes it into the news is when storms drop hailstones as big as golf balls, tennis balls, cricket balls or even bowling balls. It’s no fun being caught out in a hailstorm and can even be dangerous. There have been reports of people dying, going back to France in 1360, during the Hundred Years war, when 1,000 English soldiers were killed in a freak hailstorm. The deadliest of the last century was when 246 people died in Moradabad, India, in 1988.

Hailstorms bring out the worst in headline writers, as they struggle to find four or five letter words that create panic pictures (‘wreak havoc’ is a favourite) and so is ‘freak’, as in ‘a very unusual and unexpected event or situation’.

Hailstorms also play freakish havoc with the balance sheets of general insurers. The Insurance Council of Australia reveals its biggest payout in recent times was the $1.7 billion in losses a 1999 hailstorm caused to Sydney’s city’s east. Then there was the $31 million in losses caused by Sydney’s Anzac Day hailstorm of 2015. Not to mention the trauma and loss of production suffered by crop farmers and fruit-growers and the long queues of car owners waiting for their turn in the panel shop.

You may have already gathered I might steer this conversation from freak hailstorms to what climate change means for the world’s glaciers and arctic ice sheets.

As Sarah Gibbons wrote in National Geographic this week: “Like an ice cube on a hot summer’s day, many of Earth’s glaciers are shrinking.”

The article is based on new data from researchers at the University of Zurich. They found that melting mountain glaciers contribute roughly a third of measured sea-level rise. This is about the same sea level rise as the Greenland ice sheet and more than the contribution of the Antarctic. Their research also highlighted that many of the world’s glaciers may disappear in the next century. Sea levels rose 27mm between 1961 and 2016, roughly half a millimetre a year. NASA now says sea levels are rising at the rate of 3mm a year, with melting glaciers contributing about a third of that volume.

Glacial movement is caused by variations in temperature with snow accumulating or melting, the evidence seen at the glacier terminus. The sheer weight of the glacier causes it to move slowly downhill, whether or not the glacier is advancing or retreating.

New Zealand’s Fox Glacier advanced between 1995 and 2009 at the rate of a metre per week. Since 2009, the glacier has begun retreating again, as it did in the decades prior to 1995.

Fox and neighbouring Franz Josef are not typical glaciers, though. They retreat or advance 10 times faster than glaciers located in other countries. This is partially to do with the excessive precipitation on New Zealand’s west coast, but also the extremely large neve* above the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers.

(*that’s glacier-speak for snow accumulated above a glacier).

The New Zealand situation seems anomalous, however, as US scientists found that 2017 was the 38^th year in a row of mass loss of mountain glaciers worldwide. According to the State of the Climate in 2017, the cumulative mass balance loss from 1980 to 2016 was 19.9m, the equivalent of cutting a 22m-thick slice off the top of the average glacier.

My original premise of using ice to soothe pain arose again when friends came over to watch A Star is Born. You know that scene where Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maine drags Lady Gaga’s character Ally into a suburban all-night supermarket? This is not long after Ally has biffed an off-duty cop in the face and apparently damaged her hand.

“Better get something on that, before the swelling starts,” Maine says.

So he scurries around the supermarket, putting together a makeshift icepack to soothe Ally’s bruised knuckles. (I read this as a bit of rock star foreplay, giving Jackson an excuse to stroke Ally’s hand).

Gabe Mirkin, author of “The Sports Medicine Book,” where the RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation), acronym first appeared in 1978, now says the rest and ice part of the cure is no longer recommended. He changed his mind after reviewing the latest research, which includes a study published in 2014 by the European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery & Arthroscopy. The report found that icing injured tissue shuts off the blood supply that brings in healing cells. “Ice doesn’t increase healing — it delays it,” Mirkin says, and the studies back him up

It would seem the rugby league fraternity did not get this memo.

Perhaps they should take the tip from commentator Gus Gould, who, despite a seven-year footie career marred by injuries, appears to advocate stoicism.

“Aw that’s nothing,” says Gus. “It’s just a cork – he can run that off.”

#shutupgus

The budget that forgot climate change

climate-change-power-station — power station image by Benita Welter from Pixabay

‘The budget that forgot climate change’ may be a slightly misleading headline, even though Greens Leader Richard Di Natale essentially said as much when interviewed on 2GB. He was elaborating on a press release issued on Budget night which castigated the Federal Coalition for virtually ignoring climate change.

“(Treasurer) Josh Frydenberg said in his speech that we owe our children budget discipline,” Di Natale said. We owe our children a plan for their future, and that should mean tackling climate change through a managed transition away from fossil fuels to a clean, green, jobs-rich renewable economy. By any measure this budget fails to do that.”

The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) was blunter still, describing it as a “nightmare” budget.

“Scott Morrison’s government has given us budget that sets more money aside for a ring road in Cairns than for dealing with climate change – the biggest social and environmental crisis facing our generation,” the AYCC said.

“The LNP intends to set aside just $189 million over the next four years to deliver their so-called climate action plan – which, by the way, fails to so much as mention a transition away from coal and gas”.

To be fair, climate change did get two mentions in a Budget loaded with tax cuts to woo the nation’s middle-income earners (and an ‘oops we forgot the poor people’ moment, when the energy supplement was later extended to include NewStart recipients).

You know the old adage about shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted? The Coalition’s idea of dealing with climate change is to create a $3.9 billion Emergency Response Fund which will be used to mop up after severe storms, floods, bushfires and cyclones. The fund will grow to $5 billion over the next decade, the Treasurer said.

The Australian Financial Review’s Queensland Bureau chief Mark Ludlow outlined where the government had found the money for the Emergency Response Fund.

“The fund, which will need to be passed in legislation, will be created from the leftover allocations from the former Labor government’s Education Investment Fund as well as money that had previously been allocated to the National Disability Insurance Scheme which is no longer needed.”

One ought to mention, as Ludlow did, the government already picks up the tab for post-disaster funding under the existing Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements. The NDRRA comes into play once State or Territory funding has been exhausted.

More promisingly, the government announced a $3.9 billion Future Drought Fund, which at least acknowledges that Australia needs to plan on the assumption that drought will continue to plague the outback, if not the entire eastern seaboard.

The Climate Council took to Twitter on Budget night to spell out its disappointment.

“The divide between the parties when it comes to Coalition’s focus on tax and surpluses, and Labor’s focus on climate policy, might come down to this: would you rather leave your children with a smaller federal debt or a worldwide climate crisis.”

The tweet was linked to a University of Melbourne Budget analysis which said Australia was not on track to meet its Paris Climate commitment of a 26% to 28% reduction in emissions off 2005 levels.

“We are projected to achieve a 7% reduction, and the budget on Tuesday night offered little to suggest we can change course.”

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) rates Australia’s position on climate change as “insufficient”, which is the same rating given in 2011. CAT is an independent scientific analysis produced by three research organisations tracking climate action since 2009. CAT tracks progress towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

The Climate Action Tracker’s latest verdict (December 2018) notes that Australia’s climate policy has further deteriorated in the past year, “as it focusses on propping up the coal industry and ditches efforts to reduce emissions”.

“The Federal government is ignoring the record uptake of solar PV and storage and other climate action at State level.

“The Australian government has turned its back on global climate action by dismissing the findings of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and announcing it would no longer provide funds to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).”

The 2019 Budget confirmed that Australia’s contributions to the UN’s major fund would end in December, with a final contribution of $19.2 million. Australia has given $187 million to the fund, which finances developing world projects that cut emissions or promote resilience to climate impacts.

You may recall when John Howard belatedly made a pre-election commitment in 2007 to establishing a national Emissions Trading Scheme, starting no later than 2012.

Dubbed the Climate Change Fund, it promised that revenue from emissions trading was to be re-invested into climate change initiatives.oward made

I mention this only to point out that Tuesday’s announcement was just a rebadged Climate Change Fund – a new name for the same objectives.

The Morrison Government pre-committed $2 billion to the ‘Climate Solutions Fund’, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. It does so by (continuing) to purchase low-cost abatement through the existing Emissions Reduction Fund. Already there are claims that the government plans to use ‘Kyoto carryover credits’ to reduce our greenhouse gas pollution, even though comparable countries have ruled out doing this.

Ah well, at least we signed up for the Paris agreement, well after incoming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd honoured a pre-election promise and ratified the Kyoto protocol in 2007.

Some 195 member countries including Australia agreed to the Paris agreement in late 2015. The agreement’s long-term goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and to limit the increase to 1.5 °C.

So it has been a long journey from the first Australian greenhouse gas emissions reduction proposal 30 years ago. In 1989, Senator Graham Richardson, who must have had an inkling of what lay ahead, made a Cabinet submission for a 20% reduction in 1988 Australian greenhouse gas emissions levels by 2005.

So what does the future hold after the budget that forgot climate change, some six weeks out from a crucial Federal election where the Opposition Labor Party offers a mixed bag of policies, including a big commitment to renewable energy and climate change mitigation?

A book delivered to my mailbox yesterday delivers an unpalatable verdict. Author Anna Skarbik says Australia can be a carbon-neutral country by 2050 – “if we just get on with it”.

Skarbik is a contributor to Advancing Australia – ideas for a better country, just published by The Conversation through Melbourne University Press.

She states that the Federal Coalition’s current emissions reduction target of 26% to 28% by 2030 is not enough to meet the zero target by 2050. Federal Labor will also have to boost its promise of a 45% reduction in carbon emissions to meet this target.

“Australia would need to cut emissions by 55% below 2005 levels by 2030 to get there without undue economic disruption,” Skarbik wrote.

As she observes: “Lack of consensus on climate policy over the last two decades has cost us dearly.”

Recommended viewing:

Y dig up coal? Maleny’s contribution to the Stop Adani campaign:

Life on the planet in 2040

Vision-for-2040 — Melbourne school strike, photo by Takver https://flic.kr/p/2dfY9tt

On days when the woes of the world are too much with us, do you ever think what life on the planet in 2040 will be like? That’s the year the Doomsayers say will be the End Times or the Apocalypse. The theory is that by 2040, planet earth will no longer be able to sustain its estimated population of nine billion.

There are serious arguments for that proposition – extreme weather events caused by climate change, lack of sufficient food and water and ever-worsening pollution. There is the ever-present threat to life on the planet of nuclear war and a rolling series of civil wars which have driven millions of refugees into other countries, with consequent social and political disruption.

Imagine 2040, then. I’ll be 91, Nibbler will be 29 (which is old for a dog); Donald Trump will be 94, ex-wife Ivana 91 and current wife Melanie a spritely 70. Sir Paul McCartney will be 97 (should his long and winding road last that long), and Justin Bieber just 46!

More importantly, children being born now will be 21 in 2040 and quite angry about the state of the world they have inherited from their parents. Those who currently are angry teenagers will already be in their mid-to late 30s and maybe producing children of their own.

The key concern for life on the planet in 2040, just 21 years away, is the ever narrowing prediction about the effect of climate change on weather patterns and sea levels.

Most scientists and some futurologists will say the No 1 problem (I call it the giraffe in the wood shed), is over-population. Bluntly, the world just will not have the resources to feed nine billion people. Already futurists are saying that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be getting our daily protein from faux meat and insects.

It’s tempting to lean towards flippancy in a 1,200-world commentary on what the world could be like in 2040. Let’s imagine two affluent Poms meeting for breakfast at a café in downtown London 2039 (having got there in minutes by Vactrain from their bucolic suburbs 60 kms away). Smashed avocado on toast will cost something like 29 Europounds, a flat white about 8 Europounds. The waiter already has the order as Paul texted (by thought) while Vactraining. Henry will want to talk about the EU and how long can it last – surely one more year? Paul, feeling guilty about a story he read on the Vactrain newsfeed about six million Brits living in poverty, mutters about Brexit and what a disaster it was.

“That’s ancient history, Paul,” says Henry, adjusting his virtual-specs so he can scan headlines while having a conversation, as you do. Meanwhile the waiter returns (on his hover board) to say there are no avocadoes, despite reports of a glut, but they can do smashed grasshoppers.

Someone with a flair for satire could easily take a similar lead from the occasional quirky statistical forecast in futuretimeline, a community database/blog maintained by futurologist William James Fox.

For example, the autopsy report for Elvis Presley will be made public in 2027, thus scuppering the obsessions of the Elvis-lives club. By 2035, Millennials will be enjoying an inheritance boom, just ahead of a 2039 forecast that scientists will have found a cure for ageing!

By 2039, Alzheimer’s will be fully curable. This will be too late for some people already affected, but should I start to become forgetful at 87, whoever is in charge can take me along to the clinic. Hopefully, it will be bulk-billed.

Flippancy aside, most serious science-based forecasts focus on climate change, because of its potential to ruin everything.

Forecaster quantumrun.com cites an optimistic number for 2040 – the rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels will be 1.62 degrees. That’s just above the 1.5 degrees limit recently set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That won’t impress Sweden’s Greta Thunberg or her generational cohort. Born in 2001, she is part of what Forbes Magazine calls Generation Z, people born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. In 2015, Gen Z represented 25% of the US population, a larger group than both Baby Boomers and Millennials.

Then aged 15, Greta sparked an international movement when she started a 20-day strike outside Sweden’s parliament in August 2018. News travelled fast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. By November 30, the movement had gone viral. In Australia, 15,000 schoolchildren went on strike to call for action (despite much blustering in Parliament). In January this year, 35,000 European teens invaded the European Parliament in Brussels. Over the next fortnight more than 50,000 Belgian teens walked out of their classrooms.

You’ll see more of this next Friday (March 15), when the Youth Strikes for Climate movement stages a global walk-out.

Thunberg, who has since been the target of social media abuse accusing her of being a Green plant (har har), resolutely dug in. In an editorial published in the Guardian Weekly recently she told readers “Adults need to act like their house is on fire – because it is.”

She has pledged to continue her protest until global leaders act to meet the IPCC call to reduce carbons emissions by at least 50% within 12 (now 11) years.

Greta’s lone vigil outside Sweden’s Parliament led to her being invited to give a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland.

“Some say we should not engage in activism,” she told delegates. “Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will?”

Meanwhile I’ve started watching Season Two of a Netflix political thriller, ‘Occupied’. The plot (set in the near future). envisages a ‘silk glove’ occupation of Norway by Russia (in cahoots with the EU), to ensure Norway’s oil and gas pipelines continue to service Europe.

In the first episode of Season One, Norwegian PM Jesper Berg announces that Norway will no longer produce or export fossil fuels, instead favouring thorium* energy plants. The series (based on an idea by Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbo), shows how conflicts might arise should a brave, futurist politician defy the status quo.

*thorium is a weak radioactive element that can be used in a new generation of nuclear reactors.

Climate change aside, one of the great challenges for life on the planet in 2040 is what to do with old farts like me! In 2017 the United Nations estimated the number of people in the world aged over 60 will double to 2.1 billion by 2050. The UN also expects the cohort of people aged 80 years or over to increase threefold to 425 million by 2050.

Susan Muldowney, writing for CPA Australia’s newsletter, said that by 2040, one in five Australians will be aged over 65 and 1.2 million of them will be older than 85.

“Australia’s aged-care sector has been largely government-funded and dominated by not-for-profit providers,” Muldowney wrote in the accounting association’s newsletter, In The Black.

“However, this may change over the next decade. The number of private, for-profit start-ups is expected to grow in line with the new regulatory push toward consumer-directed aged care and the generational shift from the frugal post-Depression generation.

“The culture-changing baby boomers are used to having choice – even if they have to pay for it,” she added.

Right, then, I’m off up town to order smashed avo on toast. Enjoy it while you can, I say.