Talk on Saturday – Kariong Eco Hub

Following on from a talk at Politics in the Pub last week, Richard Weller will be speaking again Saturday evening 13 April 2013 at the “4 Seasons for Art and Film” night at Kariong Eco Hub (Dandaloo St). Hear Richard talk - listen to the Central Coast Conservatorium Strings Ensemble playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – see the film Bimblebox.

There is more with dirtgirlworld, films, storytelling and more: http://www.facebook.com/groups/149962155030538/.

Richard will be talking after the music from 6:45 to 7:30. He will focus on the issues raised at Politics in the Pub and answer questions to clear up any confusion about the science.

The most conservative organizations like The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Price Waterhouse Coopers agree that we are heading for 4 to 6 degrees of warming by 2100 if we don’t urgently change our fossil fuel dependancy. Come and hear the latest. Find out just how things stand. Ask questions about the detail. Educate yourself.

We must act and we must demand our politicians act because time is running out to keep a lid on warming.

Wyong has a responsibility to act

We have been hearing lately about the winding back of Wyong Shire Council’s sea level rise measures. CEN recently made comments on the WSC LEP (Local Environmental Plan). The LEP is the head planning document that will govern development in Wyong for the next several years.

The Mayor was heard on ABC radio recently to say regarding sea level rise measures in the LEP: “Oh we’ve taken all that out. We don’t believe in sea level rise in Wyong.”

So the Council (under the leadership of the current Councillors) has left landowners with no advice on the impacts on their property and no controls to protect property improvements into the future. Floor levels will not be raised and any housing built in the coming years will be vulnerable to flooding with potential loss of propety and life.

Councillors have a responsibility to listen to expert advice and make decisions based on the best available information. It is extremely unreasonable to deny the advice of the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology. This advice is backed up by countless scientific organizations and the 100 plus governments that sign their approval of the United Nations Reports on Climate Change and its impacts.

The position taken by Wyong Shire Council is unreasonable and highly negligent. People will suffer loss because of this misguided attitude and they would rightly have grounds for complaint.

CEN’s comment on the LEP is below:

Sea Level rise and Climate Change

The draft LEP disregards the known impacts of climate change and in particular the impacts of sea level rise on flooding and coastal processes. The Council must acknowledge the established scientific reality that sea level rise is accelerating and will be driven higher by warming due to the rapidly increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Human work output drops 10% and set to go even lower

A new report at Climate Central says we have lost 10% of human productivity due to increased temperatures and humidity. Recent extreme events have shown the impact of increased moisture in the air on our climate. This study investigates the impact on physical work output.

High humidity makes it harder to work. A temperature may be OK if the air allows sweat to evaporate, but if it is humid, the body cannot cool down by evaporation of sweat and can get over heated.

The study by NOAA projects a further loss of another 10% to human productivity by 2050 and under a 6 degree C increase (by 2200) people would be able to work only 40% of what they did before the industrial revolution during the summer months.

The impacts of global warming get more serious with every new discovery. Why should we allow our politicians to remove hard won climate protections when they should be strengthening them.

In this year of a federal election, I urge you all to vote for the climate. We have a moral responsibility to think of the future.

Read More at…

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-is-cutting-humans-work-capacity-study-finds-15654

The Moral Responsibility

Our politicians have a moral responsibility to put their own prejudices behind them in the pursuit of their duties:
“Although ordinary individuals may have no duty to go beyond their own personal opinion about the science of climate change, government officials — who have the power to enact policies that could present catastrophic harm to millions of people around the world — may not, as a matter of ethics, justify their refusal to support policies to reduce the threat of climate change on the basis of their uninformed opinions on climate science.

This is so because government officials, unlike ordinary citizens, have the power to prevent or minimize great harms to millions of people around the world, that mainstream scientists have concluded that their constituents or governments that they represent are causing or contributing to. That is, government officials have more responsibility than the average citizen to understand the state of climate change science because government officials can uniquely prevent harm that their constituents or governments are causing.”

Read more at…

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/22/1628641/why-politicians-may-not-rely-on-their-own-uninformed-opinion-on-climate-change-science/

Coal is Too Expensive

Coal has become more expensive than renewable energy and it is even more expensive when the carbon tax is added in.

Photovoltaic electricity generation comes in at 20% cheaper than coal while wind generation is now 44% cheaper. Even gas fired generation gets beaten by wind power.

After all the retoric by people wanting to stop the move to low carbon economy, finally, there is no need to continue to build coal fired power stations.

Time to ‘really’ get out of the coal business. Australia should heed this and cease investing money in rail and port facilities for coal and gas.

The report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance is reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/rising-risk-prices-out-new-coalfired-plants-report-20130207-2e0s4.html

Real Climate rounds up Earth’s Sensitivity

Real Climate has a roundup of the latest scientific papers dealing with sensitivity of our climate to CO2 increases with Part 1 of a planned series of posts.

I will leave the detail up to you to read if you wish at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/01/on-sensitivity-part-i/ . I particularly like the graphic for its clarity in showing the various timescales for feedback systems:

It sets out in simple terms the time scale of the different methods of looking at climate sensitivity.

For example, the difference between the sensitivity often mentioned in the media of around 2 degrees and that of the longer term or so-called ‘slow feedbacks’ is clearly highly significant. It is a policy critical issue whether to regard the longer term as a consideration when making decisions today.

Dire Warning from World Bank

I cannot think of a more conservative organization than the world bank. With a forward written by the President of the bank, “Turn Down the Heat – Why a 4 degree world must be avoided” was released on 19th November.

The Report sets out the litany of indicators that prove we are heading for a hotter planet. The World Bank warns that we must stop using fossil fuels or disaster will be inevitable.

The science has got worse, it says, since 2009 when the world failed to achieve an international plan to do something about the problem at Copenhagen. The Report indicates that if the countries implement the promises they made in the Bali round that followed, we would have a very small chance of limiting the rise to 2 degrees – the pledge agreed on at the time.