Extreme climate impacts are exploding in this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer. We urgently need to understand how climate disruption will affect Australians: their safety and well-being in the face of ever-more-extreme climate events, the viability of public and private infrastructure, communications and logistical systems, challenges to food security, and much more. The Australian Government is Continue reading »
climate
Australia’s environmental protection legislation needs all hands-on deck right now. City centre households have lower emissions than the suburbs. Northern hemisphere summers getting hotter. Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act review Regular readers of my Sunday contributions will be aware that I consider climate change and the loss of biodiversity to be not the Continue reading »
Ten years ago, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority wrote in a submission to the federal government that 1.2°C was a key threshold for the Reef. Beyond that, there would be a rapid deterioration in the extent of hard coral cover. The terrible reality is that we are already at 1.1°C of global warming Continue reading »
There has been much research and speculation about whether the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC, or more popularly the Gulf Stream) may collapse and what the consequences might be. Now there is new 2023 research which firms up predictions as to when it might happen. The bad news – it might be earlier than previously Continue reading »
For a transition to a low carbon economy to be just, the Australian government should force the fossil fuel industries to pay the entire cost. Just Transition refers to the measures needed to support workers and communities during a transition away from carbon-intensive industries. The concept has been adopted by many organisations including the Intergovernmental Continue reading »
The Government’s draft Strategy on Health and Climate Change is vital to cope with the expected increase in deaths and illness from accelerating climate change. It fails in many respects and should be rewritten to reflect the views of medical experts. Surely it is now obvious that climate change is the fast train to world Continue reading »
At the end of a Retreat together on “Spiritual Leadership in Difficult Times”, a German social scientist asked me to help her to organise a Retreat for decision-makers at the next UNCOP – the annual UN Conference of Parties focused on preventing catastrophic climate change in ways that are just. Just, yes, especially towards those Continue reading »
“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” said one researcher. The system of Atlantic Ocean currents that drive warm water from the tropics toward Europe is at risk of collapsing in the coming decades, an analysis of 150 years of temperature data published Tuesday concluded. “The Atlantic Continue reading »
The Queensland government is vigorously promoting coal’s social licence. Heat waves are clearly linked to global warming. The war in Ukraine is destroying the environment as well as people. ‘Coal royalties help pay for the Cairns hospital expansion’ ‘Everyone benefits from coal royalties [and] this ensures Queenslanders are compensated fairly from the earnings mining companies Continue reading »
“We can still stop the worst,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres insisted. “But to do so we must turn a year of burning heat into a year of burning ambition.” As new data released Thursday showed that July is all but certain to be the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, the heads of the United Continue reading »