NOAA just confirmed the last 400 months were all warmer-than-average global temperatures…
For 400 months in a row, our planet has been unusually hot
Our overheating planet just reached another staggering — maybe even astronomical — new milestone.In a report out Thursday, NOAA confirmed that April was the 400th consecutive month of warmer-than-average global temperatures. The last month cooler than the 20th century average was December 1984, back in the days of big hair and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
We’ve come a long way since then. Somehow, though, we’re still debating whether human activity is behind the warmer atmosphere, not to mention what the hell we’re going to do about it.
Either the last 400 months were all an incredible coincidence — we’ll get to that in a second — or something else is going on. I’m thinking it’s the latter.
…meanwhile NZ still has the highest level of climate deniers in the developed world thanks to the Cameron Slater’s and David Farrar’s of NZ…
Study finds 13% of NZers climate change sceptics
A new study has found New Zealand has a relatively high rate of climate change scepticism compared with similar industrialised countries.
…and we are pointlessly aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030…
Labour and the Greens are hyping up their plans for NZ to be carbon neutral by 2030.
I think it’s lovely and nice and respect the importance of positive sounding rhetoric to help move the sleepy hobbits of muddle Nu Zilind towards giving a shit.
But let’s be honest.
It’s meaningless sophistry.
By 2030, over 50% of the oceans will be collapsing as bio-habitats.
By 2030, East Coast cities in the U.S. can expect to see two to three-times as many flooding incidents.
By 2030, 122million will be driven into extreme poverty as direct result of climate change.
By 2030, 100million will die as a direct consequence of climate change.
By 2030, even if the Paris Agreement is actually implemented, we will see a planet warm to 3.4 degrees by the end of this century meaning there will effectively be no future civilisation capable of surviving on a planet that warm.
By 2030, the global annual cost of global warming will be $3trillion.
2030, the number of extremely hot days — classified as maximum temperatures of more than 35C — are tipped to climb in all capital cities.
Oh.
And by 2030 NZ might be carbon neutral.
Yay!
See, when you actually compare what the planet will look like by 2030, being carbon neutral looks meaningless doesn’t it?
…the simple truth is that the current political offerings within the NZ political spectrum can not and will not put the NZ economy on the war footing required to adapt fast enough for catastrophic climate change.
Look at the denial prevalent in the National Party…
…the realities of climate change will force adaptation upon us and that’s the worst kind of adaptation.
[…] Your friendly reminder the Planet is melting – Last 400 months were all warmer-than-average global… […]
Spot on, Martyn.
All major political parties will continue to promote the burning of fossil fuels until it is impossible to do so (that includes the away-with-the-fairies so-called Greens). The banks and corporations demand it. The money system and the economy before life.
Needless to say, the corrupt and manipulated mainstream media will continue to promote consumption of fossil fuels and other declining resources until it is impossible to do so.
Now that Northern Hemisphere photosynthesis is at peak it looks as though atmospheric CO2 has maxed out for the year at about 412 ppm (about 180 ppm above the 800,000-year average and about 132 ppm above the pre-industrial level). Next year 414 or 415 ppm. And in the future it will be higher, and it will be hotter than ever, with occasional icy blasts due to Jet Stream instability. .
‘Carbon neutral by 2030.’ What a sick joke: that means no cars or trucks or trains, no electricity, no home heating by natural gas, no industrially-generated food!
NZ cannot even significantly reduce fossil fuels emissions, let alone bring them to zero.
Still, ‘carbon neutral’ by 2030 does allow the politicians to keep up the pretence they are doing something.
OK now the reality of human and many other species extinction is on the horizon, what do “progressives” plan to do about it, except bemoan the failure of any capitalist institutions to even grasp this existential threat let alone consider solutions?
One reaction is that of the ‘doomers’ like Guy McPherson. After 2008 when he hoped that the GFC would bring the collapse of ‘industrial’ society, but now he has given up ‘hopium’ as he calls it and prepares for human extinction as soon as 2030.
Others like Paul Beckwith argue that there is time to engineer the climate with his 3-legged bar stool plan; stop carbon burning, extract carbon, and re-ice the arctic. But who is going to divert their privately owned wealth to such massive engineering projects in time?
Marxists, like myself, say that the problem is capitalism, or more correctly the ownership of the means of production by a tiny fraction of the earths population.
The capitalist ruling class stands between any chance of survival and extinction, so what are we going to do about it?
Logic demands that there is only one thing we can do to survive and that is to socialise capitalist wealth accumulated over centuries by the plunder of peoples and nature, and devote this wealth to a the survival of the peoples and nature.
Whadayou reckon?
http://redrave.blogspot.com/2015/12/survival-socialism.html
Guy McPherson lost the plot in 2016 and started talking about planetary meltdown ‘in a matter of months’ and ‘extinction of the human species by 2026’.
In practice, the oceans have a huge thermal capacity and warm somewhat slowly. And there is still rather a lot of ice to melt.
Nevertheless, the human specie WILL end up where it is headed (extinction) because it refuses to take the action necessary to avoid extinction. It’s just a matter of timing.
‘the simple truth is that the current political offerings within the NZ political spectrum can not and will not put the NZ economy on the war footing required to adapt fast enough for catastrophic climate change’.
This is one of the most insightful sentences you’ve written in a good long while. This is the crux of the matter, dangerous times demand radical solutions & unconventional personalities (e.g. someone like a warts & all Churchill or a John A. Lee). The enormous challenges we face today, which are largely of our own making, should be seen for what they are; a threat to the very survival of humanity. Our adaption to a rapidly changing climate & surviving in the face of environmental degradation, depletion of essential resources, unending war/terror & societal collapse will require a clever & war footing like response.
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