Yes, made connection!.I wondered whether reports of Rhodes fires on British news, even BBC, referred to climate change... however my first thought was that these peoples suffering is akin to climate refugees, I wonder this experience will affect their feelings about pictures of climate refugees...
Your pessimism is warranted, John. Although some of my scientist colleagues are sanguine that there is time to reverse course, I don't share their optimism. We have passed some biophysical tipping points and from here it's all downhill. Good reading to underpin pessimism is The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman (1984). She chronicles numerous disasters and one reads in wonderment that the leaders of the time can have been so stupid. It is playing out now. If you are ever inclined to feel optimistic, ponder why leaders of the ALP continue to appear on Sky News, legitimising its nihilism and denialism.
I swing from deep pessimism to cautious optimism. The mean does end up in negative territory.
Deep pessimism is for the inability of Australia's LibNatLab triopoly to treat it like the existential risk to our nation that decades of top level expert advice and evolution of real world impacts says it is; it isn't like they don't know.
Australia goes into international climate negotiations with intent to do the least that can be gotten away - to protect Australia's fossil fuel resources from global climate commitments - not the most we are capable of. This is in an industrialised nation with vast clean energy resources that is also at great risk from global warming. Not that any nation is free of great risk.
The optimism comes from clean energy crossing a price tipping point that makes them cost competitive and the continuing pipeline of improvements to clean energy technologies that will keep renewables on the right side of it.
I am a big supporter of R&D; whilst I don't subscribe to a belief in exponential technological growth - I think it follows S-curves, which do look similar for a while - I do think there is room for some seriously useful advances in important areas. Batteries need to get better - and they are, with significant performance improvements in the pipeline. China not only features in such developments, they appear to be charging ahead; they are certainly prominent in publishing new science.
I am not so convinced about Hydrogen as an alternative to battery electric transport or fusion for energy or even cost effective modular fission reactors but would be pleased to be wrong - even about the latter. A pet possibility I would like to see get more attention is optical rectenna's aka nantenna's, that could deliver direct heat to electricity and not only make power from the sun by day but from ground radiation by night. Or used for waste heat utilisation or dry rock geothermal or thermal energy storage.
As levels of wind and solar have grown to the point where storage is needed we are seeing investment in storage of several different sorts, all seeming to be cost effective enough; I just can't buy into the economic alarmist fear of renewables.
…… and just this morning Peta Credlin was published in the Daily Telegraph regarding ‘climate attacks’ on energy …… we surely have a lot of heads buried in the sand
It seems odd to blame fires on Aus. policy. The policy failure is in counties that do not tax or equivalently discourage CO2 emissions. Aua. could provide and example, but it would not have much effect for decades.
"The policy failure is in counties that do not tax or equivalently discourage CO2 emissions. " Australia is one such country, with a decade of bipartisan failure behind us following Abbott's end to carbon pricing
It's true that this is a global problem, so we are contributing to fires elsewhere in the world, and vice versa. But I'm going to focus on the local villains and their apologists.
Yes, made connection!.I wondered whether reports of Rhodes fires on British news, even BBC, referred to climate change... however my first thought was that these peoples suffering is akin to climate refugees, I wonder this experience will affect their feelings about pictures of climate refugees...
Your pessimism is warranted, John. Although some of my scientist colleagues are sanguine that there is time to reverse course, I don't share their optimism. We have passed some biophysical tipping points and from here it's all downhill. Good reading to underpin pessimism is The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman (1984). She chronicles numerous disasters and one reads in wonderment that the leaders of the time can have been so stupid. It is playing out now. If you are ever inclined to feel optimistic, ponder why leaders of the ALP continue to appear on Sky News, legitimising its nihilism and denialism.
I swing from deep pessimism to cautious optimism. The mean does end up in negative territory.
Deep pessimism is for the inability of Australia's LibNatLab triopoly to treat it like the existential risk to our nation that decades of top level expert advice and evolution of real world impacts says it is; it isn't like they don't know.
Australia goes into international climate negotiations with intent to do the least that can be gotten away - to protect Australia's fossil fuel resources from global climate commitments - not the most we are capable of. This is in an industrialised nation with vast clean energy resources that is also at great risk from global warming. Not that any nation is free of great risk.
The optimism comes from clean energy crossing a price tipping point that makes them cost competitive and the continuing pipeline of improvements to clean energy technologies that will keep renewables on the right side of it.
I am a big supporter of R&D; whilst I don't subscribe to a belief in exponential technological growth - I think it follows S-curves, which do look similar for a while - I do think there is room for some seriously useful advances in important areas. Batteries need to get better - and they are, with significant performance improvements in the pipeline. China not only features in such developments, they appear to be charging ahead; they are certainly prominent in publishing new science.
I am not so convinced about Hydrogen as an alternative to battery electric transport or fusion for energy or even cost effective modular fission reactors but would be pleased to be wrong - even about the latter. A pet possibility I would like to see get more attention is optical rectenna's aka nantenna's, that could deliver direct heat to electricity and not only make power from the sun by day but from ground radiation by night. Or used for waste heat utilisation or dry rock geothermal or thermal energy storage.
As levels of wind and solar have grown to the point where storage is needed we are seeing investment in storage of several different sorts, all seeming to be cost effective enough; I just can't buy into the economic alarmist fear of renewables.
…… and just this morning Peta Credlin was published in the Daily Telegraph regarding ‘climate attacks’ on energy …… we surely have a lot of heads buried in the sand
She'd know about burying heads in the sand, I suppose.
It seems odd to blame fires on Aus. policy. The policy failure is in counties that do not tax or equivalently discourage CO2 emissions. Aua. could provide and example, but it would not have much effect for decades.
"The policy failure is in counties that do not tax or equivalently discourage CO2 emissions. " Australia is one such country, with a decade of bipartisan failure behind us following Abbott's end to carbon pricing
It's true that this is a global problem, so we are contributing to fires elsewhere in the world, and vice versa. But I'm going to focus on the local villains and their apologists.