Global warming now running amok – radical adaptation the only option – will we see it in February?   

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We went through a La Nina cooling phase and the planet super heated anyway…

2020 was hottest year on record by narrow margin, Nasa says

Last year was by a narrow margin the hottest ever on record, according to Nasa, with the climate crisis stamping its mark on 2020 through soaring temperatures, enormous hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires.

The average global land and ocean temperature in 2020 was the highest ever measured, Nasa announced on Thursday, edging out the previous record set in 2016 by less than a tenth of a degree.

Due to slightly different methods used, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) judged 2020 as fractionally cooler than 2016, while the UK Met Office also put 2020 in a close second place. The European Union’s climate observation program puts the two years in a dead heat.

Regardless of these minor differences, all the datasets again underlined the long-term heating up of the planet due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities.

…we are in so much trouble.

I honestly believe we can’t change the coming climate shut down.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

I think that radical resilience, self sufficiency and economic nationalism are the only means to gain the necessary adaptation capacity to our economy, society and culture that is required to meet the challenge of climate change.

So where are we in NZ on this challenge?

Missing in action.

We declared a meaningless climate emergency that does not trigger the emergency powers  needed. This is to provide cover for the February Climate Change Commission report showing how far short we are coming in our current goals.

The fight will be over including methane (which we must) but emissions targets can’t capture the imagination of the people so Jacinda needs to hold up something genuine as a goal.

This is problematic because Labour have a record of promising big and getting nothing (light rail, Kiwibuild, tree planting) but a solar panel on every roof by 2030, all public transport electric and free or a pollution tax on big business.

Labour have to hold up a vision that makes sense to those who see the climate crisis as the existential threat to our species that it is.

Doing something in 30 years time to be carbon neutral isn’t a solution. It’s a half arsed attempt at a solution and it makes us the laughing stock of the planet for pretending we are clean and green…

On paper, New Zealand is a laggard on almost every front. Although its emissions have been constant for the last decade, New Zealand is one of the few countries in the OECD to have increased gross emissions since 1990, doing so at a rate higher than all nations except Turkey, Iceland, and Australia.

Its emissions intensity per unit of GDP is third highest in the OECD; Emissions intensity per capita is fifth highest.

New Zealand ranks 42nd of the 43 industrialised Annex 1 countries within the United Nation’s climate treaty in terms of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions, beating only Turkey. The likes of the climate action tracker, a research group which measures climate progress in a range of countries, say New Zealand is well short of where it should be.

…in the words of Greta, how dare you.

 

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29 COMMENTS

  1. “ I honestly believe we can’t change the coming climate shut down.” # Me too.

    We did have a worthy tradition of environmental awareness and commitment in New Zealand. Part of our tragedy is that this failed to translate into a practical political reality- for whatever reasons.

    • Snow W
      Our care of the environment has entailed cutting and burning most of the indigenous forest , draining over 98 % of the vital wetlands, polluting rivers to and lakes the point of toxicity killing off the life within them, overfishing the seas to the point of needing an immediate stop with fishing some species, killing off endangered sea birds and mammals causing extinction and near extinction while many of our land birds have died out and currently there are dozens of bird communities steadily disappearing.
      Every time we make a new subdivision wild habitat is extinguished.
      The RMA was entirely inadequate and now there is pressure to ameliorate its provisions because they don’t suit some developers who walk away after the damage is in place.
      So Snow White I am having difficulty in agreeing with the myth that we have/are looking after the environment.

      • John, You’re right. I ‘ve known folk lifelong and largely now dead, acutely environmentally aware and responsible; it used to be a given that outdoors people – climbers, trampers, hunters etc respected the environment, and often worked hard often at volunteer level to maintain it – but the “we “ needs to be differentiated, and it should not include government – I’m not sure who it includes now.

  2. Because we are SO clean and green we don’t need to take action to reduce our environmental footprint and can carry on operating a neoliberal economy based on looting and polluting until the globalised financial system collapses, which will probably occur later this year.

    However, with central banks pouring fake money onto the system at an unprecedented rate (far greater than occurred after the 2007-8 crisis) it may take until 2022 for the global financial-economic system to collapse.

    Until the collapse comes, the government and all its agencies will continue to pretend that it is still possible to have ones cake and eat it. And to completely fuck the planet and still be able to live on it.

    And, until the collapse comes, we must expect the criminals and clowns that meet in the Beehive to continue to make everything that matters worse faster, as per the tradition that has been operating since the first parliamentary session on 24th May 1854.

    I see that the criminal and clowns that are running Britain are offering the false hope of carbon capture as a means to continue the looting and polluting just a little longer. Instead of reassessing what we are doing to the planet and to ourselves, the maniacs in Britain are going attempt to to fuck up the planet even more, just so we can watch Top Gear and other such nonsense on television.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/16/carbon-capture-vital-meeting-climate-goals-scientists-cut-emissions

    Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the wheels are coming off the globalised industrial economy, and the decline in liquid fuel extraction that commenced in 2018 will gradually (or suddenly) put an end to it all.

    How silly of me to write ‘Stop! Enough!’ in ‘Burn Baby, Burn’ in 2001. The maniacs can’t stop and there is never enough as far as they are concerned So it will be babies burning, both metaphorically and literally at some stage in the not-too-distant future.

    I see we are now down to just two Northern White Rhinoceros. The plan seem to be to do to ourselves what we have done to the various rhinoceros species, but in a more complicated way.

    If you are looking for a good read on the corruption, lies, hypocrisy, inconsistencies and inefficiency that got the US into its current dire state try this:

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/roaming-charges-do-me-two-times-im-goin-away/

    • The bright side is that the coming global socio-economic collapse will with cetainty radically decrease pollution in all forms (and esepcially carbon), probably to levels far lower than what is required by the bogus (I had to slip that in there 😉 ) climate models.

      • I don’t think that will be the case.

        When the global economic system collapses and fossil fuels are no longer delivered to population centres, humans -being what they are- will burn whatever they can find…plastic, furniture, rubber tyres, the tar (asphalt of roads etc. and the last of the trees in populated regions.

        Only a very fast die-off would prevent such a scenario.

        Yes, the climate models are bogus insofar as they underestimate the forcing potential of methane and generally do not factor self-reinforcing and mutually reinforcing feedbacks.

        • IPCC reports are always hopelessly conservative and do not include data on likely methane runaway emissions happening at present, nor the effect of rising temperature on plant life and photosynthesis reduction.
          Many report writers have had the message within their reports removed by industry appointed shills within the IPCC ranks.
          I have personally spoken with two involved in writing parts of the last report, who have documented the changes made from the words scientist have used to describe their research observations, all done within editing groups. The messages of the scientist reports completely reconstructed to loose their primary message.
          Corruption purposely organised.

          Abbot the Ozzie PM sacked 118 of the top scientists in the CSIRO and had swathes of tax payer funded research reports on climate and limits to growth; removed from the public website. Business not only doesn’t want to know, they don’t want others to know.
          https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/razor-taken-to-csiro-20131107-2x4fu.html

          Turnbull also had a go.
          https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/move-to-sack-leading-csiro-scientist-shocks-scientific-world,9013

          https://www.billshorten.com.au/malcolm-turnbull-continues-tony-abbotts-attacks-on-climate-science-and-the-csiro

          Remember NZ had a world class research organisation run by scientists in the DSIR which was disbanded by the National Govt and parts of its work replaced by Crown Research units to work more closely with supporting commercial interests.

          The broad scientific thrust was lost as were many of the world leading projects and scientists who had to find work overseas.
          The grief for NZ expressed by several was heartfelt and patriotic in the finest way.

      • Nitrium
        If humans disappeared overnight the atmosphere would still keep warming and temperature would rise for centuries and more likely thousands of years.
        We presently have a CO2 atmospheric content of around 414 ppm.

        • Yes, John W.

          And just a little reminder that 414 ppm atmospheric CO2 is on its way to reaching 420 ppm this year, and 420 ppm is 190 ppm above the recent 800,000 year average.

          The normal state of this planet [during which humans evolved] was with substantial ice fields covering LARGE AREAS.

          The Halocene was an exceptionally warm period, and the Anthropocene is being superheated [by industrial humans] beyond all geological precedents -including the Permian Mass Extinction Event of 252 million years ago.

          The official plan is to push the atmospheric CO2 level to 450 ppm and beyond via continued use (squandering) of fossil fuels…..thereby destroying much of the habitability of the Earth via both acidification of the oceans and a several-degree temperature rise.

          The ocean heat content (the factor that REALLY MATTERS) has never been higher in recent geological history, and is rising at a spectacular rate.

          No wonder ice is disappearing everywhere.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_heat_content

          Ignorance and denial are ‘wonderful things’ that allow lunacy to prevail in the fields of commerce and politics. .

    • “Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the wheels are coming off the globalised industrial economy, and the decline in liquid fuel extraction that commenced in 2018 will gradually (or suddenly) put an end to it all.”

      Unfortunately this will create massive global starvation problems. We have relied on oil for everything for too many generations to make a sudden shift back to traditional lifestyles. Oil is essential for everything in our current global civilisation, if supply shuts down, we have no readily available alternative. For many people in higher latitudes the only possible alternative is mass deforestation as people burn wood for heating and cooking. War is inevitable as resources dwindle, anyone with left over nukes will ‘win’. There is no possibility of an environmental win by suddenly shutting down oil, global nuclear war is far more likely (bad environmental outcome), at best we have mass starvation and deforestation both creating massive forest and biodiversity loss. All that wood being burned for heating/cooking will put vast amounts of carbon into the air, so anyone wanting lower CO2 levels will not be happy. Total civil collapse would be inevitable as people begin to starve. Possible exceptions might be new rogue states relying on good old traditional genocide, plunder and pillage. Massive population decreases are inevitable, and survival of the fittest )or most brutal) will be the norm. Not good times. I suggest the sudden removal of oil is a far more serious environmental risk than the incremental increase of CO2 and global warming, mitigation is possible and when AGW really gets going there will be no further political limitations on putting full effort into saving ourselves.

      On the bright side, the earth is resilient and it should have sorted itself out in 10,000 year or so. Not much comfort to the majority of us who will die.

      • A worth while set of considerations expressed.
        Likelihoods are hard to predict.
        Local cooperatives are what we should be developing not commercialism.
        You can’t eat money.
        Resilience starts with planning and economising resources.
        Transport is something we must become independent of unless it uses little resource. Walking, horse and cart, sailing boats; and wood based steam on rails for moving essentials across land in the setting up phase.

    • I see an African puppet state has just opened up a large reserve that elephants depend upon, to a Canadian oil drilling corporation.
      Where ever there is money there is corruption and the environment suffers often drastically. Back room deals are the method that is usually immune to scrutinee but the effect is usually fairly visible.

      But some “exceptional” and brain washed communities support greed as they are trained to do or just don’t give a stuff.

      China has had growing pollution for some time but is attempting to address that currently. The USA has a history of being the major polluter. But you might say China pollutes more and on one scale yes marginally, as it produces all the junk that fills US, EU, and most other households with, junk that eventually goes to the landfill.

      The analysis of the figures has to go down to the per capita contribution.
      The USA currently emits green house gasses at a per-capita rate 9 times higher that the per-capita rate in China.
      But most of the excess GHGs in the atmosphere have built up since about 1800.
      So we need to look at the historical accumulated GHG emissions using a per capita rate on today’s population.
      The accumulated GHG emissions per capita for the USA is 26 times higher than that of China.
      Yet the USA wants more oil, is prepared to use tar sands and has quashed many efforts to promote other energy harvesting methods with reduced GHG emissions like wind and solar.
      Oil rules and pays politician to continue the suicide on behalf of their people.
      Reuters feeds Kiwis the same mindset.

      The message that is never heard is THAT HUMANS HAVE TO LIVE WITH A VERY MUCH REDUCED ENERGY HARVESTING. Capitalism won’t ever allow that message, let alone plan for a massive energy use reduction.

      The bottom line is that resource use and energy harvesting have created the present prospect of imminent end of our terminally unsustainable plunder of the planet with damaging human folly.

      China’s population is projected to peak mainly because they restricted family size. No other country has attempted that because of myopic selfish competition replacing cooperation and rational thought.

      But the tipping point for civilisation as we call it, is closing in. Expanding population, increasing consumerism, growing destruction of wilderness, tropical forests, over exploitation of the seas; all add up to a no way out of the mess without immediate massive reorganisation, an immediate cut in all consumption apart from a meager supply of locally grown plant based food for some where land for that is still available.
      Either we organise it or collapse will occur and most of those human life giving supports will not be available.
      The human population will dwindle just like the wildlife population including insects and microbial soil builders are now.

    • Carbon capture yeah right.
      Having caught it what then. Sequestration is an energy intensive unreliable solution a bit like a landfill for CO2 except a lot deeper and consuming of energy and other material resources, land and technical oversight for well into the future.
      The cost of capture and storage is far greater than the “value” of the energy captured during burning. Its a no gain hopeless myth using more energy that what is harvested creating the CO2.
      Cement a pollution of convenience.
      Buildings are put up then after a period demolished and replaced usually with larger more polluting edifices to the stupidity of business. Look at a CBD and visualizse where all that concrete, glass, asphalt, steel carpet, furnishings, digital equipment will be accommodated in a landfill.
      For thousands of years dwellings have been constructed without concrete, steel, glass and sundry. In NZ/A hundreds of years of habitation used only organic local materials for housing and that was with limited Polynesian models. Looking further afield to cooler climates, earth was used for walls and a variety of thatch systems for roofing. All recyclable.
      People here in NZ/A are building with those “organic” material but with thatch being in short supply because we just haven’t grown suitable material, often iron is used on a roof built steep enough to thatch when the need and availability arises.
      CBDs do exactly what? – that is needed.
      The essential function for a scattered society is communication and that is not concrete and glass.
      Today’s cumbersome resource intensive systems may have some great refinements but at what cost.
      A thing to keep in mind is that capitalist business is about making money not making a future.
      That needs to be turned around.

  3. It is so ironic that both NZ and the US under their current administrations are disgraces when it comes to doing something positive about Climate Change.

    In the US Climate Change is fake, so do nothing, even make things worse. As fucked up as that is, no one got mislead on the intent of their government.

    In NZ Climate Change was “My generations nuclear free moment” and in true Jacinda style, duly followed up by doing absolutely next to nothing aside from a bit of fluff/PR/virtue signalling, and now we’re even worse. And worsening.

    Perhaps Jacinda should have said, “Climate Change is my generations housing moment”, translated, fuck everyone else, we’re right Jack by virtue of the era we were was born in. You see, we won’t be around when this implodes, we’ll just carry on sweet as like we have done for the past 30 years enjoying the weather.

    Makes more sense!

    • Whilst I fully agree with your sentiments regarding Jacinda -“I’m doing fine and fuck the rest of you” insincerity- and the utterly disgraceful lack of action, either to mitigate or to prepare for the inevitable, I very much disagree with your time frame.

      The shit is hitting the fan right now…just look at the Artic ice cover:

      https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

      and read what proper scientists are saying (not the bought-and-paid-for variety that inhabit so many institutions).

      ‘A temperature rise of more than 3°C above pre-industrial could occur, and this could actually happen within a few years time. There are a number of reasons why the temperature rise could take place so fast, as described below.

      As said, the temperature is currently suppressed by the current La Niña and the currently low sunspots (Hansen et al. give the sunpot cycle an amplitude of some 0.25 W/m²). Such short-term differences show up more in the red trend of the image at the top, which uses a polynomial trend over a short period.

      Compensating for the fact that sunspots are currently low and the fact that we’re currently a La Niña period can already push the temperature anomaly well over the 2°C threshold that politicians at the Paris Agreement pledged would not be crossed. ‘

      https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/12/temperatures-keep-rising.html

    • Quite true. In fact, most of the population still don’t want to believe this is happening, and don’t think it is socially cool in their circles to even voice concern.
      For many, the Greens are still loonies on the fringe.

  4. We need to find out who did this to us.
    Why are so many dangerously polluting heavy vehicles tearing the tops off OUR roads while OUR rail systems can barely make ends meet? Not that rail should need to meet ends because public asset dumbasses. And who did that? And why?
    Why are our farmlands covered in dirty filthy shitting farting poor old cows? Cows who are permanently pregnant and survive winters by standing tits deep in freezing mud? Fuck the Chinese and their desire for our milk and fuck fontera’s ceo for his many million$ for doing sharp deals to sink our farm lands under tons of gassy cow shit and piss.
    And fuck OUR mostly corrupt local gubbimints for sucking up to central gubbimint. Old white, right wing sycophants still clinging to the satanic neoliberal’s tit because they chose to dance with their devil/s. The devils who sunk a stunningly beautiful, highly productive river valley of orchards under water to send cheap electricity to auckland’s air conditioners and the devils who throw our farmers under buses daily just to hide their swindles and rortings under the logical fallacies which are that it’s our farmers who are to blame for a country larger then the UK and with only 5 million people for having to watch hungry kids go to school past homeless people! The same farmers who die in their boots from heart attacks or are bankrupted by bankster scum or simply blow their fucking heads off.
    RNZ ( neoliberal all-bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece. )
    “Tackling farmer health, face to face”
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/summer-days/audio/2018779420/tackling-farmer-health-face-to-face
    And for allowing rich, dangerous foreigners to be able to stroll in, buy up OUR farm lands up then stroll off again with a whistle on their lips as they smirk “Suckers” at us over their shoulders.

    I warn you! Many of you, in fact, I’d say most of you, have no idea what’s really going on, of what’s gone on in the past.
    When he comes slithering back to AO/NZ you should go and get a hold of this fucker? Ask him what’s what?
    The Guardian
    What next for Trump’s trusty New Zealander?
    “Liddell was born in 1958 in the Waikato town of Matamata, the youngest of five, but grew up in Auckland and was later educated at Oxford University. He spent 10 years climbing the ranks at Credit Suisse First Boston, then at forestry company Carter Holt Harvey.”
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/16/what-next-for-trumps-trusty-new-zealander-chris-liddell
    I have an idea? How about prison?

    • A week or two in a pillory before prison, though. And six days a week working of 10-hour stints as a picker/pruner in the horticultural industry as life sentence. Unpaid, of course.

      None of that would even remotely compensate for the humungous damage Liddell and others like him have orchestrated.

  5. Breath,us ours, first, learning, of our being,breath, your our place,this earth, who us breath,and why,pollution,why, how can this happen.

  6. Aint this Labour Govt scumbags on the reality front.

    The Left knows this. Piss in the wind and severe thinness, not disavowing Roge really.

    Reminds me of the old Liberal Party here. Jace and Grant. It’s as thin as some of my linen sheets. It’s their last harrumph.

    With someone like Bernard Hickey and many more around we can overtake their sick continuance.

  7. Aint this Labour Govt scumbags on the reality front.

    The Left knows this. Piss in the wind and severe thinness, not disavowing Roge really.

    Reminds me of the old Liberal Party here. Jace and Grant. It’s as thin as some of my linen sheets. It’s their last harrumph.

    With someone like Bernard Hickey and many more around we can overtake their sick continuance.

  8. tïm.wøød

    The Milankovitch cycles are becoming more mainstream , there was water in the Sahara , even early cave paintings of turtles in the mid Oman desert . Climate change is us + the elliptical change of earths orbit .

    The earth will heat , life will change , but the earth never had humans before the way we are now . The one thing that will perhaps save us is greed and money .

    . ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ .. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ .

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