Categories
Activism Climate Change

It’s been a while…

…but I haven’t been idle…

I’ve been involved in action in other ways. I now volunteer with 350.org Australia as a divestment campaigner (last year we got the City of Melbourne to divest!) and in 2014 I stood up in the most democratic way possible to corporate malfeasance – together with 6 other protestors, I got arrested for occupying the lobby of AGL to draw attention to the fact that:

  1. They tout their ‘sustainability’ credentials yet added more fossil fuel generation capacity than their entire renewable portfolio;
  2. They put in a submission to the RET Review calling for the RET to be abolished;
  3. They had plans (now abandoned – yay!) to drill 300 CSG wells in prime agricultural land in Gloucester, NSW.
Categories
Climate Change General

rant – on

<Rant – on>

For those of you who follow my posts on twitter or facebook, some might say that a few of my recent posts have been anti-LNP…

Well, as a parent, my kids are important to me and the policies (or lack thereof) to address global warming of this governement threaten my kids’ futures, even to the extent of threatening their very lives. If anyone does that, then I will fight back with whatever tools are at my disposal.

Categories
Climate Change General Ride The Talk

New “State of the Climate” report out…

Yesterday saw the release of the third biennial “State of the Climate” report from the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). Nothing much seems to have improved in the past two years and it doesn’t paint as pretty picture of our “sunburnt country”…

Australia’s climate has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910, and the frequency of extreme weather has changed, with more extreme heat. Rainfall has declined since 1970 in the southwest, dominated by reduced winter rainfall. Autumn and early winter rainfall has mostly been below average in the southeast since 1990.

Categories
Climate Change

Turning the tide…

What if it's all a hoax?
What if it’s all a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
Categories
Climate Change

It’s crunch time…

Well, everyone, it’s crunch time.

Contrary to claims in the mainstream media, the UN has not called an emergency meeting to discuss the 5th report on the state of the science of Climate Change. The IPCC have said:

The IPCC will convene a plenary session to finalize the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, in line with its normal procedures, in Stockholm on 23-26 September 2013.

Categories
Ride The Talk

Geo-engineering???

Talk of geo-engineering as a possible solution to Climate Change scares me.

It suggests that some believe we can continue using fossil fuels as we are doing at present and still ‘dodge’ the repercussions. Apart from the costs (and who should bear these) and the possible unintended side effects, geo-engineering, unless it were to ‘scrub’ CO2 from the atmosphere, still wouldn’t address ocean acidification which has seen a 30% reduction in shell thickness of crustaceans and which threatens to collapse the marine food chain. That we are even considering geo-engineering shows how desperate our situation is becoming.

Categories
General Ride The Talk

Climate Change is a political issue

Climate Change is an issue that requires long-term thinking, planning and execution. Unfortunately for most people in Western democracies, this kind of issue does not fit into either the media cycle or the election cycle.

The media cycle is now just a 24 hour beast, whilst the election cycle is limited to either 3 or 4 years. Increasingly, anything that falls outside these parameters is considered too difficult to implement. Opinion polls have become the arbiters of good policy rather than being advocated and sold by the government of the day. Also increasingly, it seems that the role of the opposition party(ies) is purely to oppose anything proposed by the incumbents, as if this provides an alternative view or policy perspective when in point of fact it is purest laziness.

Categories
Climate Change General Ride The Talk

A Perfect Storm

The eighteenth annual session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 18) will take place from Monday, 26 November to Friday, 7 December 2012 at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, Qatar. Our “leaders” will again be talking about and considering proposals for the mitigation of and adaptation to Climate Change. I place the term “leaders” in inverted commas since it would appear that, even after 18 years of these talks, not one of them seems to want to “lead” on this issue which the science tells us will have a profound effect upon all of us.