Yarra Climate Action Now!

"When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?"

Originally published in the UK Independent, by Johann Hari


Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.

This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.

Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer...

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Two excellent articles in today's Age describe the increase in natural disasters caused by global warming, and the economic cost of last year's bushfires.

The calamities are upon us as the world warms

THEY are the extreme weather events that climate scientists have been warning about - the simultaneous catastrophes of flooding in Pakistan, wildfires in Russia and landslides in China.

Many scientists say these events are all unprecedented and that such disasters, taken together, are proof of climate change. They warn that widespread and devastating flooding will become more frequent and could be considered normal by the middle of the century.

Almost 14 million people have been affected by the torrential rains in Pakistan, and more than 1600 have died, making it a greater humanitarian disaster than the south Asian tsunami and recent earthquakes in Kashmir and Haiti combined, the United Nations says.
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In Russia, firefighters and soldiers were battling to stop wildfires from engulfing key nuclear sites while Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took to the air in a water-bombing plane to join the effort. Morgues in Moscow are overflowing as officials estimate 5000 have died in the worst heatwave in 130 years.

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Climate change will cost us all

You don't have to be Lord Stern to see how the costs of climate change are already compounding and spiralling, out of control.

Some costs are relatively benign - such as the devaluation of waterfront properties in Byron Bay as sea levels rise - a process starting in earnest whether estate agents like it or not.

Other costs are terrible, such as the conservative $4.4 billion figure put on last year's Black Saturday fires by the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, including insurance claims of $1.2 billion (property and vehicles), $1.1 billion spent by the Victorian Bushfires Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, $658 million in destroyed timber, 173 lives lost worth $645 million according to established formulae (not counting injuries) and about $593 million spent on firefighting (not counting volunteers).

Climate change features minimally in the Commission's final report, handed down a fortnight ago. That is interesting in itself, because when he announced the inquiry the Premier, John Brumby, said everything would be on the table, including climate change.

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