Another day, another groundbreaking warning of the oncoming climate apocalypse backed by thousands of experts in the field.
For the first time, 11,000 scientists across 153 countries have signed a BioScience report that, while not peer-reviewed, declares a “climate emergency”.
And while the Morrison government has yet to respond to the report, recent history offers a fairly solid clue as to whether it will.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5 degree study published in October last year found that a 1.5 degree temperature increase was effectively guaranteed and Earth would need radical changes over the next 12 years to keep the increase below 2 degrees.
And, according to the 91 authors reviewing thousands of papers over three years, a 2 degree increase would see the end of all coral reefs.
The Coalition’s response at the time was comical. Scott Morrison wouldn’t put money into climate conferences or be bound by any of the recommendations; deputy PM Michael McCormack wouldn’t be dictated to by “some sort of report”; and former environment minister Melissa Price, despite not having read the report, declared recommendations to phase out coal by 2050 is “drawing a very long bow”.
Other recent, catastrophic calls-to-arms that have failed to produce any change to the Coalition’s five-year emissions plan include:
- “We need to change how we eat and live” — IPCC Special Report on Land, August 2019
- “The economic costs of hotter weather, rising seas and weather extremes is incalculable, but in the trillions” — The National Fourth Climate Assessment, June 2019
- “One million species are threatened with extinction” — Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, May 2019
- “The bugs will go first” — Biological Conservation, February 2019
- “Weather extremes are definitely linked to global heating” — State of the Climate 2018, Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, December, 2018
- “Global heating has a strong evidence link to bushfires and heatwaves; rain and storms catching up” — Climate Council, “Cranking Up The Intensity: Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events” , February 2017
- “Climate change could make turbulence worse” — Geophysical Research Letters, October 2017.
It’s the reports on the rapid decline of insects that has shocked me this year. The car windscreen always used to need a good clean after a night drive of much length. I hadn’t noticed until recently how that’s almost never needed now. We can adapt sort of to climate change. We can stop the plastic barrage and clean it up a lot. But if the insects go we’re stuffed.
It’s very sad that Australia is being governed by a group of people with no interest or background in science. We could be a great nation!!
Environmentally responsible politicians need a more powerful vocabulary in their arguments against their denialist opponents. In particular, they need to have carbon dioxide defined in law as a pollutant. Since pollution is already established as a crime against the commons, they could then argue about emissions in the language of criminal law. Political leaders who ignore expert advice on the effects of increasing carbon dioxide could be derided as tolerating the expansion of crime.
As the public becomes more and more frightened at the mounting rate of climatic disasters, legislation could thence grow that allows the suppression of emissions by legal processes, separate from political denial. In the event of a declared emergency, denial itself could be criminalised.
The 2019 paper by William Ripple et al., and co-signed by over 11,000 scientists from around the world is a successor to a similar warning issued by William Ripple et al. in 2017 and co-signed by over 15,000 scientists (see William Ripple et al.., “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency”, BioScience, 5 November 2019: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806 ).
Presently each year 15 million people die from First World-complicit deprivation on Spaceship Earth (with the neoliberal First World in charge of the flight deck), 1 million die from climate change, and 8 million die from air pollution (this including 10,000 Australians, and about 75,000 people who die from the effects of pollutants from the burning of Australia’s world –leading coal exports). Australia is among world leaders in 15 areas of climate criminality. In the absence of requisite climate change action, 10 billion people are set to die this century in a Climate Genocide en route to an expertly estimated sustainable human population of merely 0.5-1.0 billion by 2100. Australia with 0.3% of the world’s population contributes about 4.5% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution (exported GHG pollution included) .
Humanity must urgently act to reverse climate change and must equitably share dwindling, sustainably exploitable resources on Lifeboat Earth. Professor Stephen Hawking of 90-Nobel-Laureate University of Cambridge (2007, 2018): “We see great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change” (see Gideon Polya, “War criminal & climate criminal Australian deception at UN General Assembly”, Countercurrents, 29 September 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/09/war-criminal-climate-criminal-australian-deception-at-un-general-assembly ). Australia is catastrophically burning in springtime . It is morally utterly unacceptable for Australians to vote for a serial war criminal, racist, pro-Apartheid, anti-democracy, human rights-abusing, anti-science, anti-environment, pro-fossil fuels, effective climate change denialist, climate criminal and Australian-killing Coalition.