ANSTO revs up its pro nuclear propaganda to schoolchildren at Kimba and Hawker- area selected for waste dump
Rachel McDonald The National Radioactive Waste Management Facility team hosted an open day at the Kimba office in conjunction with Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) recently.
Three classes from the Kimba Area School from Year 4 to Year 8 visited the office to build atomic structures for the younger children, take a look at the OPAL Nuclear Reactor through virtual reality technology and learn about the way science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers would change during their lifetime.
The activities were part of ANSTO classes held around the country.
The office was open to general members of the public all day, with about fifty people visiting to take a look.
The virtual reality technology has been set up in the Kimba office for a few months to facilitate learning about the role of nuclear medicine.
It will now be moved to Hawker.
Countering the pro nuclear lies of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA)
The Minerals Council of Australia joins in the current pro nuclear propaganda push – classing nuclear power as “reliable, at a very low cost, and with zero emissions” — Mining.com 22 April
Here’s my comment, which they did not publish – surprise, surprise
Nuclear power is not all that reliable, particularly now, as climate change brings extremes of weather, for which nuclear reactors are not prepared. As they require lots of water, they are usually placed near sea or rivers, posing an increasing problem with sea level rise, and sea surges. Australia is a water short country, and should not contemplate such a water-guzzling industry.
As for nuclear being “cheap” – it’s “cheap” only where the tax-payer cops the bill – Russia, China, France etc. In USA and UK the nuclear lobby is screaming for subsidies, and the building of new reactors -Hinkley Point C, and the boondoggle in South Carolina provide a cautionary tale. As for small nuclear reactors – their only hope of being economic is if the are ordered en masse – such a risk, and consequently there are no buyers. Then there’s that little problem of radioactive trash accumulating, with no solution in sight.
Meanwhile,Australia has the opportunity to be a leader in truly clean renewable technologies, which are getting cheaper, while nuclear costs mount.
Australian media bombarding us with pro nuclear propaganda as election approaches
South Australia’s “The Advertiser” can be depended upon to regurgitate nuclear lobby propaganda. Yesterday’s offering was ” Nuclear-powered desalination for SA?
Some people were impelled to write to the paper. Here are a couple of answers:
from Renfrey Clark: Nuclear-powered desalination for SA? B.W. Foster (The Advertiser, April …) has a vision of nuclear power in South Australia providing abundant desalinated water for domestic use and irrigation. But price considerations, alone, show that nuclear is the wrong choice.
In the most advanced desalination plants, which use reverse osmosis technology, the key price factor is the cost of electrical energy. Here, renewable energy sources have a dramatic and quickly increasing advantage.
Research at the Australian National University concludes that in future decades a 100 per cent renewable energy system, “balanced” by pumped hydropower or batteries to make supplies fully dispatchable, would have a “levelised cost” of A$75-80 per megawatt-hour.[1]
Comparable studies for nuclear power in the US suggest prices well above A$100 per megawatt-hour.[2]
That’s not taking into account the massive additional problems ‒ and real dangers ‒ of the nuclear industry. In 2016 the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission recommended firmly against developing almost all aspects of the industry in South Australia.
In coming years advances in desalination, along with further steep drops in the cost of renewable energy, will likely make desalinated water affordable for various kinds of high-value agriculture.
Nuclear power, however, will not be part of the picture. (picture below is of MIT’s small portable system)
from Robyn Wood : Yet again we hear the same tired old calls for Australia to adopt nuclear power (The Advertiser 22.4.19). We recently had a Nuclear Royal Commission that found that nuclear power is uneconomic. Quite apart from the safety risks and lack of a permanent high level reactor waste disposal system, the costs of building nuclear power plants around the world are skyrocketing, and the costs of building renewables is rapidly coming down. Building renewables with energy storage such as big batteries and pumped hydro makes far more sense than wasting our money on nuclear power.
USA lawmakers increasingly worried about climate change causing flooding of nuclear plants
Flooding linked to climate change puts beaches, nuclear plants at risk https://www.axios.com/climate-change-flooding-waikiki-beach-nuclear-plants-f2c4da7b-0155-4749-a47d-2e606066ee52.html 22 Apr 19, An increasing risk of flooding across the U.S. from climate change has caused lawmakers — from Hawaii to the East Coast — to consider new measures to protect at-risk areas.
The big picture: The risks span from the nation’s natural jewels to some of its most important infrastructure. Rising sea levels mean that Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach could be underwater within the next 15 to 20 years — and an increasing number of U.S. nuclear plants were never designed to handle the flood risk from climate change.
- State lawmakers are considering spending millions for a coastline protection program aimed at defending the city from regular tidal inundations, AP reports.
- 54 of the 60 nuclear plants in the U.S. aren’t prepared for the flood risks expected due to climate change “Nineteen face three or more threats that they weren’t designed to handle,” Bloomberg reports.
Climate feedback loops already are making climate change worse
It’s already begun’: Feedback loops will make climate change even worse, scientists say
David Knowles, Editor, Yahoo News, April 22, 2019
When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its dire report in October warning of humanity’s fast-approaching reckoning with global warming, one factor adding to the urgency was a new estimate about how much additional carbon dioxide was being added to the atmosphere as a result of the warming of Arctic permafrost.
With rising Arctic temperatures setting free a vast amount of carbon previously locked beneath permafrost, the additional greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere would speed up warming, the report concluded — and that, in turn, would further melt the permafrost.
It is “feedback loops” like that one that make climate change unpredictable and represent a threat of global warming spiraling out of control.
“It’s already begun,” Thomas Crowther, professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science of ETH Zurich, told Yahoo News. “The feedback is in process.”
Crowther estimates that carbon dioxide and methane emissions from thawing soils are “accelerating climate change about 12 to 15 percent at the moment,” and said past IPCC reports that left out the feedback “were way more optimistic than they should have been.”
Almost every scientist studying the effects of climate change is worried about the extent to which feedback loops will hasten global warming. One of the most serious concerns is the “albedo effect,” the amount of the sun’s radiation the planet reflects back into space, mostly from the polar ice sheets. The warming that has already occurred has begun melting the ice caps, leaving the relatively dark ocean and land exposed to absorb solar radiation — further warming the planet and leading to more ice melt.
“The impact that it has on making the earth darker by removing all the snow and ice is estimated by some to be 25 to 40 percent of the warming that we’ve experienced,” Jennifer Francis, research professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, told Yahoo News. “In other words, global warming is that much worse. There’s a lot of ways these things are totaled all together.”
Feedback loops are not a root cause of the climate change problem, but they make the problem that much worse. When climatologists began seriously studying global warming in the 1970s, there was some doubt about how the feedback loops would operate. Scientists theorized there might also be negative feedback loops, which would slow global warming — for instance, by increasing cloud cover. But so far it has all gone in the opposite — wrong — direction.
“I’m not optimistic. It’s not just because of those feedbacks, it’s because we’ve already put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that carbon dioxide lasts a very long time,” Francis said. “A molecule of carbon dioxide, on average, lasts about 100 years in the atmosphere. So, we haven’t yet felt the impacts of the carbon dioxide that we’ve already put in the atmosphere. Even not thinking about feedbacks, we’re already got a lot more climate change built into the system just because it takes awhile for the climate system to adjust itself to this new level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All the feedback that [happens is] just making that response even bigger than it would be otherwise.”
Francis has been researching how rising Arctic temperatures have been weakening the jet stream, causing shifts in weather and ocean current patterns that, in yet another feedback loop, warm the earth and further destabilize the jet stream.
“What we’re seeing is that the Arctic is warming much faster than the planet is farther south, making that north-south temperature difference much smaller and so there’s less of that fuel driving the jet stream wind,” Francis said. “That should cause the jet stream to take more of these big north-south swings. And the reason that’s important is because those waves in the jet stream are actually what create high- and low-pressure systems that we see on a weather map on TV and when you get those really big waves in the jet stream, they tend to move much more slowly, so those highs and lows we see on a weather map also tend to move much more slowly and so the weather conditions we see on the surface associated with those weather systems are much more persistent.”
Persistent weather patterns, such as periods of rain or drought lasting months, can have potentially devastating consequences, Francis said.
Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, has studied the rate at which the oceans have risen and retreated over millennia. He fears that a variety of feedback loops will contribute to a dramatic increase in sea level in the coming decades……
To Wanless, the evidence is clear that we’ve already reached a tipping point when it comes to the cascading impacts of climate change on sea level rise.
Once you start adding up these different feedbacks, because that’s the only thing we have to go on in the modern era, well, there are all these things that are speeding up ice melt, some of which we’re just becoming aware of, like the collapse of the high ice sheets. We’re just trying to figure out how fast and how dramatic that will be,” Wanless says. “A lot of them work together. The warm water getting in under the outlet fjords of Greenland and Antarctica that ends up detaching the ice from the substrate and once that happens, you can have this sort of automatic fracturing of the detached ice like a stack of books starting to splay out off a table.”
It’s sobering to realize the extent to which the planet’s ecosystem is interconnected. For years, relatively little was known about the vital role the Arctic played in keeping the world stable. As the permafrost has begun to thaw, however, the global ramifications have become unavoidable…….. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/its-already-begun-feedback-loops-will-make-climate-change-even-worse-scientists-say-090000011.html
In Ratnagiri’s Jaitapur, Fishermen Vehemently Opposed to Nuclear Power Plant
In Ratnagiri’s Jaitapur, Fishermen Vehemently Oppose Nuclear Plant. The Wire, 22 Apr 19
In Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri, the Sadak se Sansad team finds out why farmers are opposing the world’s largest nuclear power plant. In this special story from the Ratnagiri Lok Sabha constituency in Maharashtra, we speak to fishermen who have been protesting against the Jaitapur nuclear power project for over a decade. They say that the project will adversely affect their ecology and threaten their livelihoods. If completed, the plant will be the largest nuclear power generating station in the world. https://thewire.in/video/watch-in-ratnagiris-jaitapur-fishermen-vehemently-oppose-nuclear-plant
Murdoch media’s insulting coverage of the Stop Adani convoy
Former Greens leader describes Murdoch media headlines as ‘a disgrace to journalism’ The conservationist and former federal Greens leader Bob Brown delivered a broadside at “disgraceful” coverage in News Corp newspapers as his Stop Adani convoy arrived in Queensland to fervour among activists and stoushes in the local press.About 5,000 people joined Brown at a rally in the Brisbane central business district on Wednesday afternoon, protesting against the proposed Carmichael coalmine.
But Brown, whose Stop Adani convoy resembles its own mini election campaign, has attracted the ire of News Corp’s Brisbane masthead, the Courier-Mail……..
Brown, who rose to prominence because of his opposition to the Franklin Dam project in the 1980s, was asked why the Carmichael mine, and not other proposals, have become the focus of environmental and climate activism.
“I got asked that very often about the Franklin Dam. Why this dam and why not other dams?” Brown said. “This has become a litmus test for coalmining around the world. Bloomberg indeed describes it as the most contentious coalmine in the world.”….. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/22/bob-brown-accuses-news-corp-of-disgraceful-coverage-of-stop-adani-convoy
The Stop Adani Convoy
In 2017, the High Court accepted that peaceful protest is a legitimate part of Australia’s representative democracy. It is encouraging to know the Adani convoy will be a legitimate part of the nation’s public discourse. Whatever problems we encounter, they will not come near the problems caused by us doing nothing. The Adani coalmine is a harbinger of global catastrophe. This convoy of concerned Australians will be taking on Adani out of respect for our children and the future of all life on Earth.
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Bob Brown The Stop Adani Convoy , The Saturday Paper, 15 Feb 19
“………..My foundation, the Bob Brown Foundation, is preparing for a public showdown with the coalmining industry and its political backers. In the run-up to the federal election, our focus will be Adani – as the global mining giant looks set to be pushing ahead with its colossal Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland.
Before Easter, my partner, Paul, and I will be driving from Hobart to the Galilee Basin, site of the proposed Carmichael mine. Along the way we will be joining more than 1000 fellow Australians who have already signed up for the Adani convoy. It is a community commitment – an act of defiance – for the future of our planet. A peaceful protest against Gautam Adani’s mine, which his operatives say will be under way soon. The decision-making process on the Adani mine is no less murky or corruptible than that for the Murray-Darling. Adani needs approval for water management and its bogus plan to protect the rare and beautiful black-throated finch……..
On Wednesday, Queensland grazier Bruce Currie, alarmed by Adani’s potential impact on water, delivered a petition with more than 27,000 signatures to the Queensland government to ban the mine. Meanwhile, Labor’s deputy leader Chris Bowen backed the mine, saying: “Adani was to have been the largest coalmine in Australia but it is now far from that.” He has not figured that Adani still plans to take all the coal out of Carmichael and export it, only slower.
The Stop Adani Convoy will travel the length of Australia, holding public meetings and rallies en route to the Galilee Basin, west of Mackay. We will be there in solidarity with the traditional owners of the land who oppose the mine. Having visited the mine region, we plan to move on to Canberra in May to question whether Australia really wants to back pro-Adani candidates in the federal election. Millions of Australians are deeply concerned about global warming but have limited means for demonstrating that concern. We plan to unite Australians who feel our country is in self-inflicted and unnecessary jeopardy – especially vulnerable to global heating, while at the same time jostling Indonesia into second place as the world’s biggest exporter of coal.
Australia’s environmental vulnerability has been on show as the disaster overtaking the nation’s biggest river system has played out in public during the past few months. ……
There seemed to be no good time or place to make a stand for the Murray-Darling. Head in sand, the nation let it go and hoped everything would turn out all right. We must not so easily wait for salvation from Adani. There will be no divine intervention. The onus is on us. And worse is yet to come. Yet the parliamentary majority, voted in by the majority of Australians, favours more coalmining, gas fracking across the country and new deep-sea oil drilling, including in the Great Australian Bight. With the support of the Business Council of Australia, then treasurer Scott Morrison thought it reasonable to hold up a lump of coal in parliament and claim its burning was good for us. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you,” he said, taunting the opposition. “It’s coal.” With that he handed it to a gleeful Barnaby Joyce. Now the prime minister and Australia’s most powerful environment arbiter, Morrison knows – as we all do – that burning fossil fuels is both loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and serially lowering its content of breathable oxygen, for want of which those Murray cod are dead. Here we are in an age of popular greed-driven stupidity. Money rules. The value of life, let alone happiness, on Earth does not count in the marketplace of the richest per capita country in the world. This must change and only we, the people, can change it. That challenges us with personal discomfort. Faced with the immense wealth and power of the mining industry, it may seem an impossible task. But I have seen, firsthand, how grassroots campaigning can shift public and political opinion in Australia. In May 1982 the “Whispering Bulldozer”, Liberal premier Robin Gray, swept to power in Tasmania. By July, bulldozers were rolling into the Franklin River valley to build the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. Saving the wild river seemed a hopeless cause. But in December 1982 the Wilderness Society’s peaceful blockade began in the riverside forests. Some 6000 people went to the region, 1300 were arrested and 500 jailed, including me. In March 1983, Labor’s feisty new leader Bob Hawke was elected prime minister on a platform that included the slogan “I will stop the dam”. The rest is history. People power and strong leadership saved the Franklin, which has since become an icon for Tasmania’s job-rich tourism and hospitality industries. In 2017, the High Court accepted that peaceful protest is a legitimate part of Australia’s representative democracy. It is encouraging to know the Adani convoy will be a legitimate part of the nation’s public discourse. Whatever problems we encounter, they will not come near the problems caused by us doing nothing. The Adani coalmine is a harbinger of global catastrophe. This convoy of concerned Australians will be taking on Adani out of respect for our children and the future of all life on Earth. The convoy is a simple option for people who can spare some time, money and courage to act on their commonsense convictions in this age of absurdity. We will cop it from the radical powerbrokers who put coal before coral. There will be outrage about us not being at work, driving petrol-burning cars – in fact, our Stop Adani Convoy’s vanguard of electric cars will challenge the government to catch up with comparable countries in facilitating non-petrol vehicles – or simply our being “greenies”, “do-gooders” or a threat to big corporations. To offset this, there will be a special chair available at public meetings along the way for Gautam Adani – but not his understrappers – to personally take us on. Should he fly in, I think we will manage. This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Feb 9, 2019 as “A mighty convoy”. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2019/02/09/the-stop-adani-convoy/15496308007421 |
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UK Business Leaders support Extinction Rebellion climate activists, and will work with them
Times 22nd April 2019 Business leaders have voiced their support for Extinction Rebellion, theenvironmental protest group that shut down parts of London last week,
calling for an “urgent redesign” of global industry in a letter to The
Times.
January, is one of 21 executives who have written in support of the
activists’ call to action on climate change. The group also includes Dale
Vince, founder of Ecotricity, the green energy provider, and Chris Davis,
director of corporate social responsibility at The Body Shop.
imposed on business are regrettable, as is the inconvenience to
Londoners,” the group write. “But future costs imposed on our economies
by the climate emergency will be many orders of magnitude greater.”
Business is being launched. Bosses, investors and corporate advisers will
meet activists to discuss how companies can counter climate change.
Electric cars to be cheaper to buy than petrol and diesel much sooner than expected.
Express 21st April 2019 One of the barriers preventing a lot of motorists from making theswitch from petrol and diesel to electric is the higher upfront cost.
However, by 2022 the cost of electric cars is set to top below that of
internal combustion engined (ICE) cars, claims new analysis from Bloomberg
New Energy Finance.
First production delivered from Murra Warra wind farm in Victoria — RenewEconomy
First production delivered from Murra Warra wind farm near Horsham in Victoria, that will deliver cheap electricity to Telstra and other corporate buyers. The post First production delivered from Murra Warra wind farm in Victoria appeared first on RenewEconomy.
via First production delivered from Murra Warra wind farm in Victoria — RenewEconomy
April 22 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “Are You Doing Enough To Fight Climate Change On Earth Day (And Every Day)?” • On this Earth Day 2019, people in the US say that they are taking environmentally-friendly actions, yet 44% believe their actions are too small to fight climate change. A total of 32% do not feel knowledgeable about the […]
Why is Prime Minister Scott Morrison raising the suggestion of nuclear power, knowing it’s illegal in Australia?
Federal election 2019: Labor says it’s ‘extraordinary’ Morrison is ‘contemplating’ nuclear power – as it happened
Tony Burke says ‘nuclear power is against the law in Australia’. Guardian, Amy Remeikis 18 Apr 19
Morrison has tweeted that it is not the Coalition’s policy. But he didn’t actually say that when asked on Tasmanian radio today. He said it was “not, not” on the agenda, but would have to stand on its own two feet.
But like a three-eyed fish, Albo is looking to grab the headlines:
PK: He said it’s not their policy and you said he needs to explain where he will put the nuclear power plants. He doesn’t because it’s not their policy.
AA: Why did he raise it? Why did he put it on the agenda if they haven’t been giving consideration to it? That’s what he’s got to answer. Why it is that during an election campaign Scott Morrison, so desperate to try to look like he has an energy policy somewhere, has now put nuclear power on the agenda during this election campaign. Labor’s opposed to nuclear power.
We don’t think it’s necessary and we don’t think it economically stacks up. And issues like nuclear waste and where you would locate a power plant, issues that are all outstanding, it is up to Scott Morrison to say why he has put this on the agenda today…….https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2019/apr/18/federal-election-2019-coalition-labor-tax-climate-economy-shorten-morrison-politics-live
Lynas rare earths corporation still struggling with its tricky problem of radioactive wastes
Record result but still no breathing space for Lynas, The Age, Colin Kruger, April 20, 2019
It should have been a great week for Lynas Corp….. Despite soft prices in the rare earths market – and a forced shutdown of its operations in Decemberdue to a local Malaysian government cap on its production limits – Lynas reported a 27 per cent jump in revenue to $101.3 million in the March quarter……
the company was still “seeking clarification” on comments earlier this month by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, which appeared to solve the problem of the licence pre-condition that Lynas says it cannot meet – removal of the radioactive waste by September 2.
Mahathir said Lynas – or any potential acquirer (without explicitly naming Lynas’ estranged suitor, Wesfarmers, whose $1.5 billion indicative offer for the group was rebuffed in March) – would be able to continue to operate in Malaysia if it agreed to extract the radioactive residue from its ore before it reached the country.
Despite two cabinet meetings since that announcement, Mahathir has failed to clarify his comments, or confirm whether it means Lynas might not need to move the existing mountain of radioactive waste that has been accumulating at its $1 billion, 100-hectare processing facility in Kuantan province.
A FLOOD OF DANGEROUS NEW SCIENCE – PAUL BECKWITH
In the past 3 months, I brought you the science of climate change direct from specialists publishing top papers. To draw it together, we need a generalist with climate expertise. We need Paul Beckwith. Paul has two Masters degrees. He often teaches climate science at the University of Ottawa. But his tireless effort to teach extends to the Internet. On You tube, Paul Beckwith is by far the biggest teacher of climate science to the world via You tube.
KEY INDICATORS OF ARCTIC CLIMATE CHANGE
We have a new paper, published April 8th by scientists in Alaska and Denmark. The title is “Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971–2017”. Lead author Jason Box said “The Arctic system is trending away from its 20th century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic.”
Those scientists seemed surprised that temperature was the “smoking gun” for all the changes in the Arctic. (That seems obvious to me, what about you?) On the other hand, the fastest moving ice body on Greenland, The Jakobshavn glacier, has not only slowed down but is gaining ice mass. Paul says that is a temporary phenomenon, and who knows – maybe the glacier as it moved got snagged on some land way down below.
THE LINGERING COLD BLOB IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA
Could that slowdown in part of Greenland be connected to the long-lasting cold and snow in the North East, including in Paul’s hometown in Ottawa? Paul says he had “a glacier” of ice remaining in his front yard, and we talk about the cold blob of air hovering over eastern North America, punctuated by storms. Here’s his video on that.
Chat on Persistent Cold Blob over North America
The public is so focused on global warming, it is pretty hard to convince people that a depressing cold winter could also be influenced by climate change. Nobody wants to go protest in the cold, but when it’s hot, they want to go outside and enjoy themselves. So far, there doesn’t seem to be a good time to protest. Were there climate school strikes in Ottawa or in Quebec?
Some people think Paul is a radical climate scientist. But really the whole upper echelon of climate research institutes are now radical about climate change. They are practically screaming out warnings of disaster, and we talk about some of those in this interview. But despite Paul’s efforts and mine, the public still isn’t engaged. People fly all over the place, and dream about their next pickup truck with a big gas engine. It is an addictive dream. Do you expect a rapid awakening, or more years of deadly greenhouse gas emissions?
We just had another freak April storm where the temperature was expected to drop 60 degrees in Denver, going from 70 or 80 Fahrenheit to blizzards. Yet another very heavy snow storm hit Montana and Nebraska in April. They are calling it a “bomb cyclone“.
Then we had flooding in the mid-west of the U.S., right in key food production areas. I think that was a major event with long-lasting consequences. Mainstream the media forgot that story already. Of course, Paul Beckwith has a new video about that.
Why is weather in the Northern Hemisphere so weird?
SIMULTANEOUS HEAT WAVES – NEW INTERVIEW COMING UP!
I want to tell listeners about brand new science, still awaiting publication. It announces a new phenomenon in the world: simultaneous heat waves across the planet. Martha Vogel, a climate researcher from ETH Zurich, just presented the findings at a European Geosciences Union press conference in Vienna in the first week of April. Studying heat waves from 1958 to 2018, they discovered that only since 2010 has modern planet Earth experienced multiple extreme heat waves at the same time. For example extreme heat in the Mediterranean might also strike in the Arctic and Russia or North America at the same time. Transcontinental heat: that has terrible implications for food production and a lot more.
My interview with scientist Martha Vogel should be next week on Radio Ecoshock
THE NEW 2018 CLIMATE REPORT FROM THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION (WMO)
Paul discusses this report in two videos, starting with this one State of the Climate: NOT Good at All
You can read that full report “WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2018” as a .pdf online here.
According to the WMO, in 2018 the heat content of the upper levels of the ocean were the highest ever recorded. That is so dangerous!
People get confused about the difference between ocean HEAT absorption (which is 93%) to greenhouse gas absorption by the sea, (which is 25%). Since 93% of our excess heat goes into the ocean, that means only 7% is causing the disruption we are feeling now! If the ocean takes less carbon dioxide, as scientists predict, then not only will there be more greenhouse gases, but those gases will remain longer, and become a larger share of our actual emissions in the atmosphere. If so, we have to cut off fossil fuels and other greenhouse sources pretty well immediately. Strange to say, but our industrial culture may depend on ocean chemistry and ocean physics.
In a BBC article about the World Meteorological Report for 2018, Australian climate scientist and Professor Samantha Hepburn said:
“We know that if the current trajectory for greenhouse gas concentrations continues, temperatures may increase by 3 – 5 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century and we have already reached 1 degree.”
Three to five degrees C of warming is utter disaster!
SEA ICE AT BOTH POLES DECLINING
Paul Beckwith says Sea ice may be in that critical slowing down of phase-state before a collapse of sea ice. And for our southern listeners, there has been a huge fall in Antarctic sea ice. Just a few years ago it was still expanding…. https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/04/the-burning-question.html
1 This month.
Australians deserve the truth
about
AUKUS – https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/
Australians deserve the truth
about AUKUS
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 