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]]>Fortunately, in Australia today, you can use telehealth services to speak with a doctor online and obtain a certificate without leaving your home. If this sounds like something other countries could benefit from, understanding how telehealth medical certificates work will help individuals when they are sick and streamline the delivery of health services.
A telehealth medical certificate is a document you receive after an online consultation with a licensed healthcare provider. Just as with an in-person visit, a doctor assesses symptoms, asks questions, and determines whether someone should stay home rather than go into work.
This kind of certificate holds the same legal value as one you would receive after visiting a physical clinic. The only difference the service is provided through telehealth appointments done from your phone or laptop.
To get a telehealth medical certificate, a person books a virtual appointment with a registered doctor. This is usually done through a telehealth platform or healthcare app. During the consultation, the patient is asked about symptoms and general health. In most cases, the appointments are quick and straightforward, especially if the patient’s condition is mild and doesn’t require a physical check-up.
The doctor makes a decision based on what the patient tells him or her and, if necessary, issues a certificate that includes the patient’s name, date, the reason for the medical leave, and the recommended recovery time.
Telehealth is a great option for many common illnesses, especially when a patient knows what’s wrong or has had the same symptoms before. Things like colds, migraines, the flu, or mild stomach issues can usually be handled without a trip to a clinic. It also works well for people who live in remote areas or have limited access to healthcare services.
However, if you have serious symptoms like high fever, chest pain, or trouble breathing, a telehealth appointment may not be enough. In those cases, it’s better to go to an in-person clinic for a proper check-up and treatment.
One common worry is whether a telehealth medical certificate will be accepted by a workplace or school. Most employers and academic institutions in Australia today recognize these certificates as long as they are issued by a licensed healthcare provider. The key is to make sure the doctor’s registration number and clinic details are listed on the document. Check with the HR department or school administration to see if telehealth medical certificates are accepted before making the call.
One of the biggest benefits of using telehealth is that it saves time. A person doesn’t have to travel, wait in line, or risk spreading an illness to others in a waiting room. The entire process can be done from home, making it a lot easier to rest and recover.
The flexibility and speed of getting a telehealth medical certificate make it a great option in many situations, especially when proof is needed to support a sick day request.
Shouldn’t other countries with telecommunications infrastructure to support telehealth consider doing what is already being practised in Australia? For the United States and Canada, telehealth medical certificates would make sense.
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]]>The post Western Democracies Singing From The Same Hymnal On Climate Change appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Canada has an escalating price on carbon pollution and this week announced new tax credits to polluting industries to match those in the IRA. At the same time, Canada is vested in an oil pipeline to increase the capacity of oil sands operators to ship their products offshore and to the U.S.
Then there is Australia with the Labor Party now in power. It has reversed policies from the previous Liberal Party governments and committed to carbon emission reductions in 2030 by 43% compared to 2005 levels. At the same time, it is continuing to back natural gas projects, pipeline development and new coal mines.
All three governments are preaching from the same hymnal. They remain committed to fossil fuels because without them the impact on their countries’ current and near-future economies would be devastating. Their strategies emphasize an orderly transition with predictable outcomes that ensure the democratic nations of the world will be able to buy “democratic” oil, gas and coal. And at home, emission reductions would make each of their countries reduce emissions to achieve interim and 2050 net-zero targets.
None mention that the oil, gas, and coal that they export will end up being burned by their customers. The emissions and their contribution to global warming will not be coming from them.
Does this sound like greenwashing?
Originally, greenwashing was something businesses did to mislead investors and the public about their environmental credentials. But it sounds to me like we can add democratic governments to that definition. Expect more of it as COP27 begins next week in Egypt.
Holding this environmental gab session on the continent of Africa, the canary in the climate change coal mine should be an interesting affair. The promises of the Paris Climate Agreement to provide US $100 billion annually to Global South countries to help mitigate and adapt to climate change has yet to be fulfilled. And Africa more than any other continent is suffering the most because the money isn’t flowing, the projects to mitigate and adapt cannot get going, and the climate is changing.
Just look at Kenya in the last couple of years. The northern half of the country has hardly seen a drop of rain while the southern half is inundated with flooding. Or take Somalia which has experienced three years in a row of little to no rain. That’s three years of crop failures contributing to further political destabilization.
Our atmosphere is a shared commons. It doesn’t matter where emissions are produced. Political boundaries don’t stop greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming doesn’t stop at borders.
If you can encase your country in a glass bubble then you might be on to something. But you can’t. And although we will hear about the progress being made by the United States, Canada and Australia when their representatives speak at COP27, they are all acting like they are already living under glass bubbles.
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]]>The post Australian Projections of a 3 Celsius Temperature Rise Paint a Dire Picture for That Continent appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Australia today is already 1.4 Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in 1910. That’s awfully close to the lower limit established in Paris. In addition, the surrounding Pacific and Indian Oceans are both 1.0 Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) warmer than back at the beginning of the 20th century. And when you consider that Australia is already the driest of the inhabited continents (only Antarctica is drier even with all that ice), small differences in atmospheric temperature have a profound impact on rainfall, extreme weather, and groundwater resources.
In the 3 Celsius scenario by the turn of the next century, the neighbouring oceans will be far more acidic. Ocean oxygenation will diminish leading to dead zones. The impact on marine life will be negative and dramatic. The impact on coral reefs will yield an extinction-level event. The warmer ocean water volume will expand and will further be fed by melting ice from Antarctica with the likely result sea level rises of a half-meter or more by 2100, and much higher in subsequent centuries. With Australia’s major cities and most of its population living within close proximity to the ocean, saltwater intrusions will negatively impact wetlands, and freshwater aquifers and lead to significant coastal flooding.
As for the continent’s ecology, at 3 Celsius the report states it will be unrecognizable with major extinctions occurring among Australia’s unique marsupial, avian, and reptilian wildlife.
The report leaves no stone unturned in looking at other impacts including the threat to food production, health, and the wellbeing of the continent’s citizens. It forecasts that almost 90% of Australians will be affected by extreme heat conditions, bushfires, and severe storms. The energy supply infrastructure as it exists today will be insufficient to deal with the extreme stresses from extended heat waves and droughts.
The human impact from extreme heat will also be reflected by Australia’s agriculture sector with farms suffering from diminished water supply, heat-stressed livestock, and overall declines in yields. Already Australian farmers growing wheat and barley have seen a decline in profitability of 22% since 2000. If this trend continues the farms may cease to exist exacerbating food security.
Is there a plan of action to hold back these dire forecasts? Professor Lesley Hughes, a contributor to this report and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Macquarie University believes that although the 1.5 Celsius goal is no longer achievable, “we should still be aiming for a stable global temperature below 2 Celsius.”
The report paints a way forward through policy actions that include:
In addition, the continent needs strategies to help its human and wildlife populations deal with extreme events. It needs negative emissions, not just a net-zero strategy. It needs to draw on the native knowledge of the Aboriginal community who preceded colonial settlement and has demonstrated an ability to adapt to Australia’s varying climate conditions over thousands of years. It needs to implement a plan to move its population away from vulnerable shorelines. And it needs to develop new technologies that will mitigate the worst extremes of climate change and allow for adaptation to the new circumstances of, hopefully, a world 2 Celsius warmer, and not 3.
Australian climate scientists have been fighting a war of words with the country’s Conservatives since 2013 when an elected climate-change-denying government began dismantling and defunding internal research programs. It led to the formation of a Climate Council crowd-funded by Australian citizens. Today a growing number of Australian cities and town governments are working with the Council through a partnership aimed at achieving some of the policies described above.
As for Australia’s current leadership, it continues to dither when it comes to meaningful carbon emissions reduction policy. On the government’s parliamentary website dealing with climate change, it begins by stating “climate policy continues to be controversial.”
In what way? It doesn’t say. Instead, it describes the mechanism that the current government has chosen to fight global warming. It is called the Emissions Reduction Fund which remains chronically underfunded and continues to demonstrate that it cannot produce any meaningful results to help the people and other continental denizens of Australia to adapt and mitigate the climate change that lies ahead.
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]]>The post Wildfires, Australia and the Face of a Planet’s Changing Climate appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>But anytime the calendar turns from a nine to a ten or a nineteen to a twenty, we tend to make a big deal of it. This is a commons mistake and one with which we can live, unlike mistakes being made by many nations around the world when it comes to taking climate change action.
It doesn’t take much more than casual observation to see a cause and effect correlation happening around our planet when talking about climate.
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate activist, points out that “people are already suffering and dying from the climate.”
From a decade of record-breaking global temperatures, outbreaks of unprecedented wildfires in North America and Australia, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons that are increasingly ferocious and unpredictable in behaviour, massive ice sheet melts in Greenland and Antarctica, blobs of unprecedented ocean surface heating in areas of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans causing massive fish kills and deoxygenation events, and reinsurance industry reports that show the cost of climate disasters reaching new all-time highs, there is plenty of evidence that our Earth’s climate is changing.
A single event in today’s headlines brings all of this new reality home. In the town of Mallacoota, near Sydney, Australia, it is being reported that people are seeking refuge in the Tasman Sea because of an approaching wildfire that threatens their community. The picture below of a glowing and smoky red sky says it all. The radiant heat from blazing bushfires combined with temperatures that have hit the 40+ Celsius (over 104 Fahrenheit) has led to emergency workers and the Australian media advising people to seek shelter in the water.
Australia is the canary continent in the coalmine when it comes to envisioning our global future. There are currently 100 wildfires burning, threatening many of the country’s cities across the southern half of the continent. The fires are so widespread they are creating their own weather. And while the Australian government has remained reticent about acting to combat climate change, an independent crowd-funded Climate Council, formed because of a previous climate-change denying government, defunded government environmental climate studies, has issued a report describing the fires as “not normal.”
The report ties climate change to the worsening state of bushfires in the country pointing to significant changes in precipitation patterns and temperatures since the mid-1990s and the drying out of the continent’s southern half.
It key findings can be summarized in the illustration below and include:
What is even more frightening about Australia’s plight is that peak fire season has yet to be reached. That comes in the next two months. So far, however, millions of hectares of bushland have burned or are on fire making the California wildfires of 2018 seem like minor incidents.
The collateral environmental damage cannot be underestimated with 500 million animals already dead including 30% of the country’s Koala population. Koala feed on Eucalyptus trees which are predominant in many of the areas where wildfires have or are occurring. And as has been shown in other parts of the world where this Australian native tree has been planted (Portugal, Spain, and California), Eucalyptus is a fire-prone species that becomes perfect kindling for wildfires.
In an article appearing in Scientific American today, entitled, “Australia’s Angry Summer: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like,” it describes Australia as “the most fire-prone of all of Earth’s continents.” It points out that the continent has seen a mean temperature increase of more than one Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) in the past one-hundred years. That the southern half, in particular, has been drying out over that same period of time. And that anthropogenic forces are affecting wind circulation in the Southern Ocean beneath the continent impacting Australia’s southern half negatively as rain-bearing fronts pass to its south.
When you see words like “never been seen before in the historical record” when describing growing drought conditions in Australia, it is no wonder that wildfires on the continent are no longer behaving “normally.” And what has Australia’s Climate Council so upset, is that the data and evidence it has collected on climate change made all of this so predictable while government leaders fiddled and the country burned.
So although we haven’t yet officially turned the decade over (see my opening comments) it is time for global efforts to treat 2020 and the years that follow with a degree of urgency through enacting policy and programs that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the coming decade and beyond and maybe save Koalas in the process.
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]]>The post A Quick Review of Climate Change in the News This Last Week appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>If you were in Venice this week you came face-to-face with the world of the near future.
Venice has seen sea levels rise 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) in the last 50 years. It doesn’t seem much but when you add a wind blowing from the south and high tides, you get what this city’s mayor called “climate change in action” and “a wound that will leave a permanent mark” on the city.
Water levels on two consecutive days rose 1.8 and 1.5 meters (approximately 6 and 5 feet). A meeting of the Veneto regional council had just concluded without it passing funding to tackle climate change when the building where it was sitting became inundated.
A bookstore near St. Mark’s Square, aptly named Aqua Alta (meaning high water in Italian) found itself underwater in almost two meters of water.
The city, which was founded in the year 697 CE (AD) will likely completely flood in the next 50 years without technological intervention in the form of a massive investment in protective dikes and seawall gates. Meanwhile the current attempt to do this, known as Project Moses, and designed precisely to protect the city, remains well behind schedule, over budget, fraught with corruption from politicians and contractors, and all of this still on the go sixteen years after the project was approved.
The unhinged political leadership in Australia continues to ignore the climate crisis.
With bushfires threatening the state of New South Wales and the country’s largest city, Sydney, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, described the conflagrations as old news just happening a bit earlier than normal this year.
Not to be outdone, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is trying to outlaw climate protests describing those who go out on the street as “indulgent” and “radicals.” Morrison, who is big on coal, argues that China is the problem and that they need to do more. Meanwhile the country is opening a new coal mine with China the preferred customer for what is produced.
But getting back to McCormack’s comments on a radio talk show this week, he stated: “we know it’s getting drier, we know it’s getting…very warm.” Duh! But what that has to do with global warming….apparently nothing.
Too bad Greta Thunberg can’t get Down Under to shame these fellows to the core of their being.
If you think that climate change is an existential crisis and you live in one of the 175 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, then I hate to tell you, almost every signatory is failing to achieve any of the interim milestones agreed to back then.
The flaw of the Paris agreement was it was non-binding. Countries were left to set their own targets and they did. But according to the Climate Action Tracker, an organization that assesses progress related to the Agreement targets, almost none have succeeded in meeting interim milestones. Climate Action Tracker forecasts we are headed for more than twice the 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise in atmospheric mean temperatures. That’s global mean temperatures rising by 4 Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit). And at the poles expect those numbers to hit double digits.
To make matters worse, greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 rose by 2.7%.
So who among the nations of the world have been on target to meet their Paris pledges?
Morocco, and Gambia on target for a 1.5 Celsius rise, and Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and believe it or not India for a 2.0 Celsius rise, even though the latter this week has witnessed unprecedented smog enveloping the capital Delhi; the cause, vehicle traffic, cooking fires, and neighbouring farms burning their fields after harvest.
Having seen the previous headline it shouldn’t be a surprise that if a child was born today it would experience a diminished quality of life from that of its parents. Besides extreme weather events, displacement from coastal cities from sea-level rise and sunshine flooding, children will experience respiratory problems from extreme atmospheric heat and pollution, increases in asthma, and exposure to tropical insect-borne diseases in temperate latitudes.
The Lancet states that “the life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change, with populations around the world increasingly facing extremes of weather, food and water insecurity, changing patterns of infectious disease, and a less certain future.”
More frequent heatwaves will have a profound effect on newborns.
One of the authors of the study states:
“We roughly know what [it] looks like from a climate perspective…We have no idea what it looks like from a public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic. We know it has the potential to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health and overwhelm the systems we rely on.”
The study looks at 41 climate change indicators and notes that the threat to children will start in the womb and accompany them all the way to adulthood.
They are predicting:
And you thought parents are vigilant about children today. In the decades that follow expect hyper-vigilance in a world where the climate crisis will be in full swing.
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]]>The post The Wildfires in California and Australia are Not the Norm appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>See the map below which appeared in a Bloomberg news feed I received today. It depicts where risk of wildfire outbreaks in Australia are increasing because of growing drought conditions. The word “unprecedented” is increasingly associated with what can be seen here.
These are the same words that describe conditions in California with the word unprecedented appearing in a headline in the Los Angeles Times last month in an article entitled “Unprecedented power outages begin in California as winds bring critical fire danger.” It turns out that Pacific Gas & Electric, (PG&E) California’s largest utility was instituting an unprecedented policy by shutting down power to customers in areas where “widespread dangerous fire weather” was likely to cause wildfires. This had never been done before and was quickly followed by other California utilities who also shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers.
Greg Mullins of Australia’s Climate Council, and a former Fire and Rescue New South Wales Commissioner, in an opinion piece published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald writes about Australia’s latest outbreak of bushfires stating, “If anyone tells you, ‘this is part of a normal cycle’ or ‘we’ve had fires like this before,’ smile politely and walk away, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.” Australia’s fires are now happening in places where such occurrences have been described as infrequent to non-existent. These areas include the rainforest and old-growth forests of New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania.
In New South Wales fires are reportedly creating pyro-convective events. What are they? Also known as pyroCBs they are fire-induced storms that are caused by thermal columns of air laden with ash, blazing wood, vegetation, and water vapour rushing into the sky to form pyro-cumulonimbus clouds topping the stratosphere. PyroCBs are being observed with greater frequency, and climate scientists attribute this to overall global warming. PyroCBs can spawn fire tornados which can send burning embers up to 5 kilometers from the storm source making fighting wildfires from the ground next to impossible. This year has seen pyroCBs in Australia, and California. They have also been observed in British Columbia, Texas, Portugal, South Africa, and Argentina.
California has what it now calls “fire season,” the new norm for the state in the fall and early winter. Fed by two phenomena, the Diablo (Northern California) and Santa Ana (Southern California) winds that can produce gusts reaching top speeds of between 125 and 160 kilometers (approximately 80 to 100 miles) per hour, and combined with low relative humidities of between 1 and 2%, they have created conditions akin to those in Australia.
Mullins describes Australia’s current condition as “more intense than the Millennium Drought,” an event that lasted from 2001 to 2009 and nearly dried up the Murray River Basin, the country’s largest river system. It was so extensive it caused lake levels along the river course to reach one-thousand-year water-level lows. It damaged ecosystems extensively, caused water rationing on farms and in communities, and led to water alerts for Adelaide, South Australia’s largest city.
As of November 1, 2019, California has seen 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of its forests and scrublands burn. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the numbers are far lower than the firestorms of last year and are a testament to what has been learned from previous fire seasons. When PG&E, which serves 16 million households, pulled the plug on power to more than one million homes and businesses it was an adaptation and prevention strategy and although it caused considerable public uproar, in fact, it probably prevented a 2018 repeat.
The vigilance and planning for wildfires are now part of California’s DNA, as it should be for much of western North America, Australia, Mediterranean countries, South Africa, and Argentina where climatological conditions are becoming more susceptible to wildfire outbreaks. These unprecedented and growing fire seasons are a phenomenon of human-made and human-worsening conditions. In all of these places, it is becoming a way of life and may foretell a future when conditions there become unlivable.
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]]>The post Safe Climate Restoration Think Tank Describes the Existential Risk to Civilization as Early as 2050 appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Two reports, the first entitled, “Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach,” and the second, “What Lies Beneath: The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk” have been produced by Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration Australia, an independent think tank focused on climate change policy.
Breakthrough describes their particular expertise as in the reinstating of natural climate systems and processes to mitigate the conditions being observed linked to atmospheric heating, sea level rise, and ocean acidification. They are champions of “blue carbon,” the restoration of coastal ecosystems, representing 0.2% of the oceans, consisting of seagrass, tidal marshes, and mangroves, and storing 50% of the sequestered carbon found in marine sediments.
Blue carbon projects, the think tank argues, are 10 times more effective per hectare as natural carbon sinks than current terrestrial ones including afforestation, and grasslands. They are also two times more effective than current soil sequestration and biomass projects. At the same time, however, they are under siege globally with 67% of mangroves, 35% of tidal marshes, and 29% of seagrasses lost to shoreline development, sea level rise, and coastal erosion.
Blue carbon as a climate change strategy brings with it additional benefits. It’s not just the sequestering of carbon that makes these areas of the planet vital to its health, but also it is their ability to reduce coastal flooding, erosion, and the damage storm surges can cause.
The think tank has been going about analyzing the security risk climate change poses, and in both of these reports describes a 2050 scenario that is disturbing. Breakthrough researchers draw on much of their data and information from IPCC sources and that of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which despite the anti-climate science position of American leadership, are firmly supportive of the science.
Today’s DoD defines climate change as both a security and existential risk because of the “shocks and stressors to vulnerable nations and communities” around the world. In a Pentagon 2015 report, before the current administration was elected, it concluded that “global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems — such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions — that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries.” And although these conclusions have largely been ignored by the current President and his cronies, changing climate is already visibly impacting the military at the Norfolk-Hampton Roads Atlantic Ocean naval base which currently is feeling and dealing with the threat of rising sea levels.
One of the Breakthrough reports contains a foreword written by Admiral Chris Barrie, Honorary Professor, Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, Canberra. Admiral Barrie, now retired from the Australian Defence Force was its chief from 1998 to 2002 and is currently a member of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change. It seems that Barrie and other military leaders such as those in the Pentagon understand the existential threat which is more than can be said for those who give the military their marching orders in both Australia and the United States.
But let’s get back to the Breakthrough report. In it, the authors state that there is global science agreement on warming of 4 Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) degrees, describing this as being incompatible with our world as we know it, for both humanity and the majority of ecosystems. It further brings in information from a World Bank report on the same subject that describes such conditions as being “beyond adaptation.”
The two reports project a current path for our planet to see a rise of 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) mean temperature by 2100, not including “long-term carbon-cycle feedbacks” which are feedbacks related to the interaction between temperature change, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and how carbon is exchanged in nature.
For example, trees form natural carbon sinks converting carbon into wood. Cut a tree down and burn it and it becomes net emitter. When natural carbon sinks begin emitting carbon, for example, permafrost melt which releases methane into the atmosphere, we get a positive carbon-cycle feedback. Or when the oceans become saturated with carbon from the atmosphere, the capacity to continue absorbing it diminishes, meaning carbon is no longer being removed but rather is staying in the air and building up at a faster rate.
Positive carbon-cycle feedbacks like these accelerate atmospheric warming and put us on a path not of a 3 Celsius rise, but more likely a 5 Celsius (8 Fahrenheit) mean temperature increase by century’s end creating what scientists refer to as a “hothouse scenario.”
In one word, “frightening.” A breakdown of the decades leading up to 2050 unrolls as follows.
When policymakers and governments fail to act aggressively enough in the 2020 to 2030 time period carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels reach 437 parts per million and warming by 2030 increases by 1.6 Celsius (2.9 Fahrenheit). This puts the world in a scenario not seen in 20 million years ago.
Some mitigation efforts get implemented and by 2030 the Earth’s nations manage to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning by 80%. But the latency effect from the CO2 buildup pushes temperatures up by another 0.6 Celsius (1.1 Fahrenheit).
But that doesn’t include any positive carbon-cycle feedback, which likely adds another 0.8 Celsius getting us to the 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) increase by mid-century.
What are those carbon-cycle feedbacks?
They are tipping points impacting Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and glaciers which begin to melt more at an accelerated rate.
They are tipping points brought on by an ice-free Arctic Ocean every northern summer.
They are widespread permafrost melting in Canada and Siberia and the subsequent release of methane (CH4) a short-term and even more potent greenhouse gas.
Such tipping points may occur well before global atmospheric mean temperatures rise by 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit) with the end result the “hothouse scenario” which could include:
Today we are only beginning to understand natural planetary climate cycles like the El Nino and La Nina.
But what happens when we end up with a semi-permanent El Nino?
We have seen how in recent years California and the U.S. Southwest was impacted by El Nino cycles. Now imagine if an El Nino just doesn’t happen once every three or four years, but becomes almost a permanent condition of the Pacific Ocean.
The El Nino butterfly effect is blamed for a lot of different weather phenomenon.
In a semi-permanent state, it could cause the drying up of 30% of the Earth’s continental landmass leading to severe desertification in Southern Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Australia, and the U.S. Southwest. And it would cause the coral reef systems where much of the ocean’s biodiversity resides, to collapse.
Increasingly less likely a fantasy than a horrible future reality and not one uniquely believed by the researchers at Breakthrough. The scenario as described above isn’t one of their creation but comes from work done by the U.S. national security apparatus who in 2007 filed a report describing a climate change world of 2050 as follows:
“Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events.
In this scenario, nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease.
The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability.
The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities.
Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.
The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos.
In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.”
What is frightening to note, is that some of what is described is already beginning to manifest. The social cohesion of many nations is under stress. We call these failed states. Are refugees from Africa, and Central America the first of millions moving away from an untenable existence brought on by the carbon crisis? Is the rise of Jihadist Islam in Africa correlated directly to climate change? Are we not seeing what lies plainly in front of us?
So on the eve of D-Day when many of the world’s leaders gather to commemorate an event that could have been described as existential, it would be good if they could recognize what lies ahead and act to make sure we never experience the hothouse scenario as depicted in this posting.
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]]>The just published Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment report reveals that the planet’s third pole, the glaciers of the Himalaya Mountain chain is melting rapidly with predictions that two-thirds of the ice volume may be gone by 2100. The Hindu Kush is a primary water source for the rivers that flow into India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and the nations of Southeast Asia, home to 2 billion people. The report represents the cumulative work of 200 scientists and was subjected to peer review from 125 outside experts. Even if the global mean temperature rise were to be contained at no greater than 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) the research indicates that a third of the ice would be gone. At a 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise, half would disappear.
The Hindu Kush is a range of mountains 3,500 kilometers in length. Over that distance some of the glaciers remain stable, and some are even increasing in volume. But the largest number are melting leading to increased river water volume. This is expected to continue through the mid-century before volumes decline wtih the Indus and Central Asian rivers most impacted.
Following fast upon the latest reports about Antarctica melting six times faster than four decades ago, comes the revelation that an enormous cavity has formed under the Thwaites Glacier which is currently pouring 50 billion tons of ice into the Southern Ocean annually. The contribution of this glacier alone is contributing to 4% of global sea level rise. But the discovery of the cavity, over 300 meters in height, and 10 kilometers in length, represents 14 billion tons of missing ice. The findings appear in the January 30, 2019 edition of Science Advances.
As for the story about the faster melting of continental ice from Antarctica, the report appearing in the January 14, 2019 edition of the journal PNAS is troubling because it shows ice loss has accelerated by a factor of over six since 1980. The volume represents 252 billion tons and is contributing to sea level rise of 1.3 centimeters (0.5 inches) over the period studied.
The Southern Hemisphere is into summer and Australia, already hot, is seeing new record temperatures across the continent. In Adelaide last week the thermometer rose to 46.7 Celsius (116 Fahrenheit). January has turned out to be the hottest month in the country’s history with the mean temperature exceeding 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). This follows the warmest December on record with every state and territory in the country under a heatwave.
In a special climate statement issued on January 24th, the country’s weather service described conditions affecting areas from the tropical coasts of Queensland to Western Australia. Rainfall was reported as only 20% of average. Bushfires broke out in Tasmania under the heat and tinder-dry conditions. In New South Wales one community reported four consecutive days of temperatures above 47 Celsius (117 Fahrenheit). In the Murray-Darling basin, Australia’s largest river system, scientists reported hundreds of thousands of native fish dying from rising river temperatures leading to algae blooms and the deoxygenation of the water.
Meanwhile, at the northeastern corner of the continent, abnormal monsoonal type rain has created devastating floods. Nearly 120 centimeters (4 feet) fell in seven days accompanied by 90 kilometer (50 mile) per hour winds. In one day 25 centimeters (close to one foot) fell.
If any country and continent is the canary in the cage for climate change, it is Australia.
Stated Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Director Gavin Schmidt, “2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend.” Temperatures last year were 0.83 Celsius (1.5 Fahrenheit) degrees warmer than the mean registered between 1951 and 1980. And 2018 turned out to be the fourth warmest year on record just behind 2016, 17, and 15. NASA reported that the past five years represent collectively, the warmest years ever recorded.
NASA gathered the temperature data from 6,300 weather stations, ship and buoy sea surface temperature observations and measurements from Antarctica. NOAA issued findings just slightly lower than those of NASA (a rise of 0.79 Celsius or 1.42 Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average. GISS is within the Earth Sciences Divison of NASA with laboratories in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Columbia University in New York City.
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]]>How familiar this sounds to what has been happening since the inauguration of Donald Trump and the approval by the Senate of his choice, Scott Pruitt, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt considers the EPA, according to an article written in yesterday’s New York Times, to be the equivalent in the public’s mind of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a predatory and regulatory regime that imposes its will on honest American citizens just trying to make a living. EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, and an enemy of science.
EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general who made a habit of suing the EPA regularly, is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, an enemy of science, and an appointed fox now in the environmental movement’s henhouse.
Between the President’s requests to dramatically cut the EPA budget and Pruitt’s stocking of administrative positions with like-minded individuals, Americans will no longer have a watchdog monitoring the excesses of mining and utility companies as they pollute the air and water. The watchdog agency’s gloves have been tied up and put back on the shelf for a 4-year interim. There is no more EPA punch to stop polluters. This President, who during his campaign promised clean water and clean air, will deliver neither as he moves on scientists and programs studying climate change. This represents a reprehensible step backward and existential threat to all Americans and the rest of the planet, the only one we know with certainty, that is inhabitable.
How can I say this?
In the headlines the last few days we received an ominous forewarning of future global warming. Scientists, at the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, reported carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, the greenhouse gas most associated with global warming, will for the first time, surpass 410 parts per million (ppm), a threshold not seen in the geological record since humans first appeared on Earth.
Richard Betts, climate scientist, noted that April or even sooner will see CO2 reach 410 ppm. That follows a record rise last year that put us permanently over 400 ppm. And although 10 ppm seems like a small increment, the greenhouse gas impact of CO2, cumulative over time, will undoubtedly happen, raising global temperatures, and lingering well into future centuries.
Even more frightening is the trending that shows CO2 levels rising at a faster rate than in the 20th century. It wasn’t that long ago that we were at 350 ppm, what many scientists felt was a safe level for atmospheric CO2, creating conditions that were far more benign to human existence. But now at present rates of CO2 contributions made by us, will take us to 450 ppm within 20 years. With levels that high, the forecast for global mean temperature will exceed 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), the upper limit target agreed to by the nations of the world at the Paris COP21 Climate conference.
Pruitt, a fossil fuel man all the way, has appointed climate science deniers (think Senator James Inhofe, for one), to help him try and find alternative facts to the science, ignoring the evidence that abounds. He will declare the news that 2016 was the warmest since human recordkeeping began in the 1870s, to be false. He will argue that everything observed to date is part of the natural cycles of the Earth. He will point to the Sun and blame warming on changes in the solar cycle. He will tell you that axial wobble is the real science responsible for climate change, and not CO2. He has no intention of looking at the real science and data that those in the EPA have compiled for several decades.
So many U.S. scientists have tried to find a safe haven for their research. Recently Canadian universities and companies have volunteered to archive data collected by American environmentalists. Researchers at University of Toronto have been backing up science data from U.S. EPA, NOAA, NASA, the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies in a race to retain the information before it gets trashed by Trump, Pruitt and their minions.
So what else to do?
In Australia, people and scientific community got together and created a non-government body, the Climate Council, to monitor climate change. The funding came initially from a crowdfunding campaign which in three days raised enough money to allow those laid off or fleeing positions in government to find a place to do their work.
The same can be done in the United States where crowdfunding got its start. To me, an Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign to create an Environment Climate Council, sounds like the route to go over the next four years or until President Trump is impeached, and his science-denying cadre gets dumped from office.
Although I am not an American, I would be happy to get this started, and invite my readers to give me a shout out to make this a reality.
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Genex Power, a New South Wales-based company is in the process of taking the abandoned mine site located in Queensland and transforming it to generate hydroelectric power using a technology called pumped storage.
Back in 2013 I wrote about a proposed pumped storage project located at the site of an abandoned open pit mine in Ontario. That has yet to be realized but the conceptual description of how this technology works was well described in that posting. If you have not had the opportunity to read it, simply put, pumped storage replicates what nature can provide when we harvest the energy of falling water. Hydroelectric power, a technology that has been with us for more than a century, uses natural occurrences of water falling from higher elevations to lower ones to capture energy using spinning turbines that connect to generators which in turn feed power lines.
In pumped storage water from a low elevation uphill to one that is higher. The energy consumed in the process is provided a low use off peak periods. The gained energy potential gets released during peak demand providing additional power to the grid. Genex has had very little to do in adapting the existing quarries for this purpose. The water supplied has come from a nearby dammed river.
The pumped storage is just one part of a much larger energy scheme. The Kidston Solar Project built on site takes advantage of an area in Australia designated to be an optimal solar exposure zone throughout the year. The solar project is being built in two phases. Phase One will include an array of panels generating 145 Gigawatts of renewable energy annually. Phase Two will provide triple the capacity, quadrupling solar energy generated from the site. The solar power generated will be the energy source used to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir creating a closed loop system.
States Simon Kidston, Executive Director of Genex, and a descendant of the founder of the mine upon which this power project is built, “We’re not aware of any examples anywhere else in the world where there is a large pumped storage system, or any efficient storage mechanism, with a renewable generation component attached to it – not on the scale we’re talking about.” The abandoned mine infrastructure combined with solar exposure rating of the site has made this an ideal locale for combining the two technologies. Total cost to build has been less than $300 million in Australian currency. Completion date is 2018.
There are many more sites in Australia with similar configurations, former working open pit mines that can be adapted in this fashion. There are equally similar sites in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia where pump storage could prove to be an invaluable renewable energy source. And that is not the only way pumped storage can be configured. For example, cooling towers like the one in the image below, found in association with coal-fired and nuclear power plants, could be utilized in pumped storage renewable energy projects after their existing usage ends. As coal-fired plants close this may be an excellent way to repurpose these sites considering they already are linked to power transmission networks.
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