ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

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Juliar
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ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

Post by Juliar » Tue Jan 14, 2020 1:38 pm

ScoMo knows the hysterical minority screeching their rubbish about the Climate Change SCAM do not vote for him.



Scomo could further lift Australia’s carbon emissions target
January 14, 2020News Vanessa Zhou

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Burn Burn the vile Greenies screech in ecstatic delight!!!

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has signalled a further increase in the nation’s carbon emissions target in the wake of the national bushfire crisis.

Morrison told the ABC that the federal government could evolve its policy to not only meet its 26 per cent reduction target by 2030, but also beat it.

The government will do it “without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices, without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood,” the Prime Minister said.

Morrison, who is supportive of the mining industry, announced plans last year to cut complex project approval times from years to months.

He added that closing down Australia’s power generation facility would not be a solution, as China could take up those emissions in about nine days.

“The government’s policy is … to reduce emissions, to prepare our resilience for the future and prepare our adaption,” Morrison said.

“We’ve already announced those measures in Budgets and we’ve already put money towards those goals. That is the government’s policy.”

Morrison also emphasised there would be no change to the Australian Government’s position as a signatory to the Paris Agreement and its emissions reduction target.

“The (Australian) government is a signatory to Paris. That hasn’t changed. The Government’s commitment to 26 per cent emissions reductions has not changed. The Government’s commitments to take action have not changed and we’ll continue to do it,” he said.

“(The government policy) isn’t just restricted to bushfires. It deals with floods, it deals with cyclones, it deals with the drought which is affected by these broader issues.”

https://www.australianmining.com.au/new ... ns-target/

Juliar
Posts: 1355
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 10:56 am

Re: ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

Post by Juliar » Tue Jan 14, 2020 1:41 pm

ScoMo goes after the votes by boosting Australia's economy.


ScoMo to cut green tape for major mining projects
November 21, 2019News Vanessa Zhou

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ScoMo wants to get Australia up and going.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced plans that promise to cut complex project approval times from years to months.

The government intends to create a single digital environmental approvals process to help push a large pipeline of major projects forward over the next decade starting with Western Australia, Morrison said during a speech to the Business Council of Australia on Wednesday night.

The Prime Minister said his government was focussed on busting the obstacles that slowed down and even stopped business investment and job creation.

The digital platform will be a consistent nationwide process that will help get national projects up and running faster, along with a biodiversity database that will be rolled out nationally.

“Our deregulation agenda has a laser focus on reducing the regulatory compliance burden on business,” Morrison says.

Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Cabinet Ben Morton added that government was tackling regulation from the viewpoint of business, “putting ourselves in their shoes, getting down on the factory floor and looking at regulation from their perspective.”

“There is always more work to do, but the government has renewed our commitment to deregulation,” Morton said.

The government will also deliver a one-stop shop for business registers that makes it easier for businesses to interact with the government.

It is working to adopt regulation technology (‘regtech’) solutions so businesses can navigate and comply with regulatory requirements cost-effectively.

The government will also continue working with states and territories and the business community to simplify Australia’s business environment.

“We want to create the space for businesses in our economy to back themselves and take our growth to the next level,” Morrison said.

“The reforms we’re delivering hone in on what we’ve been hearing directly from Australian businesses that will help them grow and employ more people.”

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable conceded that regulatory complexity and duplication, including overlapping state and federal processes, has delayed minerals projects and reduced global competitiveness without improving environmental protection.

The announced measures are positive steps towards a more certain and timely approvals process, according to Constable.

“The current review of the the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act and the Productivity Commission’s review provide further opportunities to the federal government to act so Australia’s minerals industry can provide more sustainable, highly-skilled jobs and support stronger regional communities,” she concluded.

https://www.australianmining.com.au/new ... -projects/

Juliar
Posts: 1355
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 10:56 am

Re: ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

Post by Juliar » Tue Jan 14, 2020 2:03 pm

And why ScoMo is correct in ignoring the hysterical screeching minority who are just trying to get people interested in their farcical UN One World Socialist Govt in a Sustainable World.


Delingpole exposes Australia’s bushfire propaganda!
AMM 14.01.20.

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The bigger the fire the happier the Lunatic Extremist Greenies become.

Australia’s ‘climate’ fires are fast becoming the biggest fake news scare story of 2020.

All the world’s stupidest, most annoying, hand-wringing, virtue-signalling leftists, luvvies, eco-loons, shyster politicians, second-rate activist scientists and other bottom feeders are jumping on the bandwagon.

The fires themselves are all too real: no one is disputing that – or the damage they have done. At least 27 people have been killed – including four firemen; an estimated 15.6 million acres have been burned; hundreds of properties have been destroyed; hundreds of thousands of animals, both livestock and wildlife, have been incinerated.



Delingpole: Australian ‘Climate’ Fires Are Pure Fake News Propaganda
Source: James Delingpole, Breitbart 12 Jan 2020

But the narrative that this has anything to do with ‘climate change’ is the purest eco-propaganda fiction. Here is the truth about Australia’s bush fires.

This is about politics, not climate
Australia’s leftists have never forgiven Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party (ie Australia’s conservatives) for winning the general election in May 2019. That’s because it was billed as the ‘climate election’, which the left was supposed to win.

As I wrote at the time, in Australia – as in the U.S. and the UK – the left thinks global warming is an election-winning issue. But the voters just aren’t interested.

Everyone — encouraged by Australia’s left-leaning print media and rabidly left-wing state broadcaster ABC — was convinced that this was the election that was going to be won on climate change. Greenpeace actually billed it as a “climate election”. Australia’s Labor party, campaigning on a strongly anti-climate change agenda, was going to oust the incumbent Liberal (i.e. conservative) government because public concern about the environment was so overwhelmingly strong.

Didn’t happen though, did it? Instead, the Liberals won.

Now all the losing losers who lost in Australia are taking their revenge by demanding the resignation of Scott Morrison (aka ScoMo), supposedly because of his mishandling of the fires. They couldn’t beat him by fair means so now they’re trying to do it by foul means.

Nothing to do with climate change
The dry, hot conditions which have exacerbated these fires are weather, not climate. Australia, a hot, dry country, has been here many, many times before.

To recap:
As Paul Homewood pointed out last month, there has been no significant long-term decrease in rainfall or increase in temperatures in the affected regions.
Yes, it has been dry in New South Wales (where most of the worst fires are), but there have been several years, especially pre-1960, when it was drier:
First, let’s look at rainfall. All the data and graphs that follows are from the Australian BOM:

Image

As we can see, rainfall in NSW over the last three months is well below average, but no worse than several previous years on record.
The same applies to temperature. Yes, this has been a hot spring in New South Wales. But there have been times when it has been much hotter — making a nonsense of all stories in the Australian media about temperatures being the hottest ever:
Neither is the monthly average of 38.0C a record high. The three years from 1899 to 1901 all saw average December mean maximum temperatures well above 38.0C.

Image

Since the station moved to the airport in 1993, 38C has only been exceeded once until this year, that was in 2005, when it averaged 38.5C, still well below the December 1899 when the mean was 39.9C.

Furthermore, Australia’s longer-term climate record shows that drought periods are natural and cyclical, suggesting there is no reason to believe that they are anthropogenic in origin.

Eastern Australia has experienced eight megadroughts – all of which predate the invention of aircraft, SUVs etc.How many roos, koalas and goannas were killed off during the fires of the great 39 year drought of AD 1174 to 1212? A lot more – you can safely bet – than have been killed in 2019/2020.

But back in the 12th and 13th century, Australia was blessed with having not a single left-wing academic or greenie blogger to tweet heartrending pictures of burned wildlife. What a civilised place it must have been: brown snakes, taipans, funnel web spiders, scorpions, saltwater crocodile, sharks – but not a single whining ‘progressive’ to lower the tone.

Even if Australia cancelled its economy tomorrow, there’d still be bush fires till the end of time
Australia’s CO2 emissions – as of 2018 – were 1.18 per cent of the global total. Suppose ScoMo were willing or able to put a stop to Australia’s industrial output, the resultant drop in anthropogenic CO2 would be offset in a matter of weeks by the growth in India’s and China’s.

Why should Australia’s economy – and the people who depend on its prosperity – be made to suffer on the basis of a lie promulgated by a handful of activists and propagandists and amplified by a bunch of useful idiots?

What’s really causing the fires. 1. Arsonists
Since the start of the bush fire season last November, Australian police have arrested nearly 200 alleged arsonists. Whether it’s ‘arson jihad’ (as recommended by ISIS) or deranged greenies trying to draw attention to the ‘climate emergency’ or bored kids or even perfectly innocent people who were just trying to light a barbie in the bush doesn’t much matter: the point is that a lot of these fires were indeed man-made.
Just not man-made in quite the green propagandists’ understanding of the phrase.

What’s really causing the fires. 2. Fuel Load
There’s too much combustible material in the Australian bush. Back in the day, the Aborigines burned it off; so, following their example, did the early settlers; so, until quite recently did most rural Australians.

But then the environmentalists stuck their oar in with their fashionable notions – borrowed from Rousseau via the German ecologists and the Nazis – that nature should be left in a wild and pristine state, unsullied by man. So these idiot ‘uni’ graduates with their soft science degrees infiltrated the news media and the universities and local government – and made it harder and harder for landowners to clear the undergrowth and excess trees round their property, even if it was for potentially life-saving purposes like creating fire breaks.

Amazingly, the greenies are denying that this is the main cause of the fires – an extraordinarily outrageous and brazen lie which I shall deal with in a separate piece.

But there’s far too much evidence for it to be denied. Here is an excellent piece on the subject in the Spectator by Tim Blair.
As those fires roared through Australia’s eastern coast, killing residents and volunteer firefighters and destroying hundreds of houses, a not-unrelated court report appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. It told the story of 71-year-old John David Chia, who in 2014 paid contractors to cut down and remove 74 trees on and around his property.

The judge in this case noted that Chia’s primary motivation for the tree removal was ‘his concern about the risk of fire at his property’, but found also the Sydney pensioner’s actions had caused ‘substantial harm’ to the environment. Chia ended up copping a $40,000 fine — more than $500 for each tree.

Australia – contrary to its Crocodile Dundee image – has some of the whiniest, most self-righteous and interfering lefties in the world.

Here – courtesy of Blair’s piece again – is another example of them in action:
Even minor attempts to reduce that fuel load are punished. Let’s suppose, for example, you have a wood fireplace at your rural house. Doing the right thing by the law and the environment, you do not cut down any trees to use as firewood. Instead, you simply collect dead branches and fallen trees lying around in the bushland dirt.

This also reduces the amount of fuel available for potential bushfires, so you’re on the side of the angels.
But wait! Heed the warning from NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service Central West area manager Fiona Buchanan, in April last year: ‘We are getting the message out there that removing firewood, including deadwood and fallen trees, is not permitted in national parks. We want people to know the rules around firewood collection… It’s important people are aware that on-the-spot , fines apply but also very large fines can be handed out by the courts.’

She wasn’t bluffing. A man had earlier been fined $30,000 for illegally collecting firewood in the Murrumbidgee Valley National Park. Why? Because, as Buchanan explained: ‘Many ground-dwelling animals and threatened species use tree hollows for nesting, so when fallen trees and deadwood is taken illegally, it destroys their habitat. This fallen timber is part of these animals’ natural ecosystem.’
Australia has seen worse bush fires than these….

As Jo Nova notes, we have just passed the 80th anniversary of Black Friday, 1939:
On Black Friday 1939, on a day of high wind and savage 45 degree heat (110 Fahrenheit) many separate fires joined forces in Victoria to make mass conflagrations, one of which burned most of the western flanks of the Snowy Mountains all the way to New South Wales. In the end the conflagration burned through two million hectares, 3,700 buildings, 69 mills and killed 71 people.

Five towns were completely destroyed – never to be rebuilt. At the time, the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide was 310ppm and 90% of all human emissions were yet to be made. Climate Change has nothing to do with it.

In the end, they were horribly unprepared, the forests were horribly overgrown and the weather was horribly extreme.
Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.

Australians have long known what really causes bush fires…
Few sensible Australians believe the nonsense that climate change is responsible for these fires. The ones that do believe it are the kind of people who, in the U.S., would have voted Hillary and who in the UK would have been Remoaners in the Brexit debate, for there is a strong correlation between globalism and a love of big government and total gullibility when it comes to anything that has to do with climate change.

But there has been plenty of evidence out there for anyone prepared to do some basic due diligence as to what really caused these bush fires.
Tony Heller has produced a must-read round up of some relevant archive material, including reports on the Royal Commission into the 1939 Bush Fires.

Among the findings:
The fires were man made.
There was a long drought followed by extreme heat.
The amount of controlled burning was described by the Report as ‘ridiculously inadequate’.


Sound familiar?
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
And where this Australian bush fire tragedy is concerned, no one deserves more opprobrium than the greens whose poisonous, anti-human, anti-science, anti-history ideology has turned what could have been a minor inconvenience into a full-on disaster.

https://morningmail.org/delingpole-expo ... ore-111788


And some very pertinent comments

Lorraine 14/01/2020, 8:42 am
The Greens are to blame and the left can do” the look over there” and blame SCOMO. Any one with a brain, that’s a functioning brain, knows man with matches lit the fires, knows in a drought, knows with not much water to fight fires, knows yes the change in climate is on going . Again those that voted for the Greens are to blame ,and we need to weed them out of local councils and State Governments . call them out on their rotten policies…No deals with the Greens should be done in the future, just to get something thru Parliament …No more deals and change the rules on locked up Parks . State and National


DT 14/01/2020, 9:23 am
And surely most people understand that State Premiers and the Emergency Services Commissioners are responsible, not the Prime Minister.


Neville 14/01/2020, 10:30 am
Nah, DT. They don’t.
About 70 years of creeping leftism, inserting themselves into all parts of the system, the stealthy ‘long march thru the institutions’, have resulted in an electorate which faces every little trouble, every little setback, with the mental approach “the guvmint must fix this’, and “somebody elses’s fault”, and by guvmint they mean any non-leftist PM.
Just another illustration of the lefty-greeny blob.


Aktosplatz 14/01/2020, 10:21 am
‘A Case Supposed reveals the Remedy Proposed”

Get the ‘Case’ wrong and that means the ‘Remedy’ won’t work.

Here, The Case Supposed are the “Drought and Bush-fires.”

Reducing CO2 emissions by going to wind and solar will not solve this particular ‘case’ = Wrong Remedy

Bush Management and building of dams will = Right Remedy.

Oh, and for those who say CO2 is the major heat trapping Greenhouse gas, no it isn’t, Water vapour H2O is. People often notice what a ‘muggy’ day is, and that is heat and moisture combined , you can feel it.

Dry heat which is what you get inland, away from the sea, is much more bearable, because there is much less water vapour, but the same CO2 as the coast.
Where there is less water vapour you can sweat much more easily giving better cooling to your body.

This did not require any computer modelling to come up with this.

Maybe that’s the answer also; turn the computer off, pick up a pick and shovel, clear the bush and build dams.

Juliar
Posts: 1355
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 10:56 am

Re: ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

Post by Juliar » Tue Jan 14, 2020 4:33 pm

Greenies surfing over bushfire facts
JENNIFER ORIEL 8:30AM JANUARY 14, 2020

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Illustration: John Tiedemann

Wildfire is natural, cyclical and regenerative. Australian flora has adapted to survive bushfire and some indigenous species thrive on it.

However, the ferocity of recent fires that scorched the country is shocking. The recovery will be painfully slow for those directly affected. Communities will be rebuilt or left behind as people seek safer ground. As city folk return to work, they will forget. But for people in disaster zones, the fires will stalk them by day and haunt them by night until they burn out or the rain comes.

Amid the terror of the season’s fire disaster, people are grieving for what is lost, angry about what they cannot control and afraid of what might come.

Green-left politicians are using the fear for political gain. The green-left media is drumming up conspiracy theories that blame conservatives for the weather, the fires, dry earth, scorching wind, death, destruction and doomsday scenarios of some hypothetical future dystopia. My present favourite is a Guardian article on the fire tragedy that leads with: “Australia is built on lies, so why would we be surprised about lies about climate change?”

As a first-generation immigrant, I have seen a fair share of Australian bushfires. I was a kid growing up in Adelaide when the Ash Wednesday bushfires took 75 lives. On Black Saturday in 2009, I was closer to the tragedy.

Victorians woke up to winds so hellish they broke the backs of saplings, stripped the air of moisture and seared our skin. When the first fire sirens went off in the morning and fire trucks roared down the street, I was doing the weekly shopping. People stopped, looked at each other and said it wasn’t going to be good. But we had no idea what was coming. By late afternoon, we were bunkered down. By early evening, I was glued to ABC radio.

Neighbours were preparing to leave. I was urged by friends to evacuate after my suburb was included in warnings issued by the Country Fire Authority. For some it was too late and many left only after hearing reports that people were dead in Kinglake, about 55km northeast of Melbourne, and that the fires had reached nearby St Andrews. I fled for the city as the fire developed into a storm that threw embers kilometres ahead of the front.

The shock of Black Saturday was a strange thing. I thought I was perfectly fine until feeling a sudden urge to stop on the Eastern Freeway into the city. I pulled over, walked to the side of the road and was violently ill. When I arrived at my friends’ house in North Fitzroy, they poured a whisky and sat me down. They said I was in shock, but I reassured them it was not the case. After settling my pet and opening my suitcase, I realised they were probably right. The contents of the case were absurd and I had no memory of packing them only a few hours earlier. I had taken nothing of financial value or practical utility. Instead, what lay before me was a half-empty suitcase with a pair of socks, books and a clock radio laid out on the base. All I could do was laugh. It was simply bizarre.

When I returned home the following week, the hills were like a wasteland. My suburb had been saved by a wind change. But in the surrounding areas, people were stricken with grief. The usually friendly towns were laid low and an uneasy quiet hung in the air. People walked the streets saying little and staring into the middle distance. Some were looking for missing loved ones or pets. Everyone knew someone who died. The atmosphere had an ashen quality, as though a grey veil had settled to protect the present from the past.

Amid the panic and tragedy of devastating wildfires, what we needed most was immediate relief in the form of care, reassurance and simple kindness from friends, family and employers. The communities directly affected needed swift aid and financial support. Everyone needed something a little different. But what we didn’t need was cheap politicking.

The Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader have taken the higher ground in recent days by agreeing that a royal commission into the fires is a sound idea. The bipartisan approach is constructive and should produce useful recommendations if the terms of reference are set well. The green-left is looting low-hanging fruit by making political capital out of the national disaster. The major parties should leave the scavengers to their ghoulish feast and concentrate on the question of what caused the major fires and how to mitigate risks in the future.

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission unearthed the causes of the fire and the institutional failures that enabled it to spread without adequate warning to communities at risk. Yet despite recommendations on regular backburning to reduce fuel load, some areas between St Andrews and Kinglake appeared to be overgrown when I last drove through the area in 2018.

A central challenge of any future royal commission will be to create an enforceability mechanism to ensure fuel load is kept at a minimum while conserving the natural environment in fire risk areas. As Rachel Baxendale reported on Friday, the Victorian government has not undertaken fire reduction measures consistent with the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. The state Labor Party that encourages activism and blames natural disasters on climate change is neglecting its basic duty to keep Victorians safe.

The government does not control the weather. It cannot stand guard at every home while fires rage. It will never be responsible for every inch of land in the country because Australians believe in private property and the responsibility home ownership entails.

Politicians who use climate change to divert attention from their failure to enact bushfire prevention plans should talk less and do more to help communities in need. Reducing fuel load is something state and local governments can do as a matter of routine. It may not make for lively conversation with cosmopolites but it will save lives.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commen ... ade7d45804


And a few enthralling COMMENTS

banjo 18 MINUTES AGO
The birds of a feather/keep it in the family syndrome was never clearer than on last Saturdays the ABC`s ( Perth radio ) early morning Girlie show with Ms Gibbs, From 0515 to 0530 this broadcaster allowed an open, uninterrupted platform for The Guardians hard left Marxist columnist and regular ABC Marxist Drum show performer Vanessa van Badham licence to espouse her views on how bad the LNP was how wonderful and misunderstood the Green party was and how climate change had been the main cause of our catastrophic fires - all this at tax payers expense with no right of reply - This elitist club could be ScoMo`s nemesis come next election.

Kathleen 19 MINUTES AGO
"We already know from several previous Royal Commissions into previous bushfires, the 2009 disaster most recently, that the biggest issue is fuel management. That this has not been aggressively addressed by now is the tragedy, and arguably the crime". I think some people should consider a class action against the State and Local Govts for criminal negligence. The science of reducing fuel loads is far more certain than the science of climate change.

Chris 21 MINUTES AGO
Another excellent article Jennifer. The Green-left, with the aid of much of the media, has developed so much power that governments have revoked their duty of care by abandoning proven methods of bushfire mitigation to now blame a highly questionable cause, anthropogenic global warming. One or two degrees won't change much (particularly when fires in the main are human caused) but proper forestry management with fire loads reduced to levels applied decades ago will. Then lives, property, livestock and wildlife will be saved.

Chris 36 MINUTES AGO
Our population is being artificially increased which means that less water is available for all of us and that people are living in even more remote places. The buildup of fuel is the culprit. Fires don't start by themselves. With more inputs into the fire chain, ie fuel, oxygen and the fatal spark, it is no wonder we have more fire damage.

Andrew 39 MINUTES AGO
Anyone who screams climate change denier has already lost their argument.

James 51 MINUTES AGO
I grew up on a farm in central Queensland. We used to routinely clear and back burn and employed local aboriginal people to assist as they knew best. This was back in the 80s. We still had drought, extreme heat, flood and fire then but the effects were controllable. Over time we saw more rules, road blocks, regulations and downright stupidity from our local councils and state government which meant we couldn’t even clear our property with some sort of heavy environmental penalty or fine or court action or hate from some irrelevant environmental group.

You reap what you sow. Our country is unique and we need to look after it properly. We have failed catastrophically to maintain our land at
Government level and at a individual level.

We have become less and less resilient over time and lost ability to proactively manage our land. I grew up on the land not in the city and I guarantee you the climate changes all the time.

This sensationalist dooms day climate change BS needs to stop.

We have the technology, smarts and money to do better than what we did back in the 80s yet we’re so concerned about the screaming minority and not fixing the problem.

C 55 MINUTES AGO
The only new information that yet another Royal Commission into yet another bad bushfire is the specifics of each case, e.g. the ignition source (natural, accidental, "accidental", or arson), and the culpability of specific government bodies, at all and any levels, for failure to permit ALL appropriate means of fuel reduction. In that respect only will it be useful.

We already know from several previous Royal Commissions into previous bushfires, the 2009 disaster most recently, that the biggest issue is fuel management. That this has not been aggressively addressed by now is the tragedy, and arguably the crime.

"Climate change" has nothing to do with any of it, except that it has spawned the cult-like adherence to the lock-it-up-and-leave-it attitude to the "environment" and the dangerously flawed "re-wilding" movement. What these movements, that were supposed to be about preserving and protecting what has actually been utterly destroyed, are the very false theories that caused the degree of destruction.

Justin 1 HOUR AGO
And already the sober discussion begins.
Great article, capturing both history (from an Australian bush fire perspective - this isn't our first rodeo), and calling-out what Greenies do best; twist facts to suit their insanely impractical altruism.

Juliar
Posts: 1355
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 10:56 am

Re: ScoMo not influenced by Climate hysteria

Post by Juliar » Tue Jan 14, 2020 7:17 pm

The stupidity of the Lunatic Extremist Greenies knows no bounds as these idiots who caused the bushfires have released record amounts of carbon dioxide. Which has very little effect on anything. But not according to the sick diseased Greenies!!!!


Australia's Wildfires Are Releasing Vast Amounts Of Carbon
Nathan Rott January 12, 20207:00 AM ET

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Much of New South Wales, Australia, including the Sydney Opera House, lay under a shroud of smoke Thursday. The state remains under severe or very high fire danger warnings as more than 60 fires continue to burn within its borders.
Cassie Trotter/Getty Images

Smoke from the ongoing firestorm in Australia is obscuring skies halfway around the world. Satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show a haze from the deadly fires spreading over South America. The swirling plume is nearly the size of the continental United States.

All fires emit smoke — a combination of thousands of compounds, including climate-warming greenhouse gases. But the sheer scale of the emissions, and the severity of the fires causing them, are concerning climate scientists around the world.

Already, atmospheric watchdogs say, the fires have pumped hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere.

"For these fires in the southeast south (of Australia), probably we are in the ballpark of 400 million tons of carbon," says Dr. Pep Canadell, a lead scientist with Australia's national research agency and the executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions globally.

To put that figure in perspective, Australia's total emissions from man-made sources last year was roughly 540 million tons. So this year's fires, fueled by record-high temperatures and drought, have already surpassed two-thirds of that amount.


But perhaps more concerning is that many of these fires, including two that merged into a massive "megafire," are burning in areas that could take decades or longer to regrow.

Forest ecologists and atmospheric scientists generally view wildfire as being carbon neutral. As fires burn, chewing through structures and vegetation, they spit out vast amounts of carbon and other compounds in their smoke.

"But then over time, we expect a lot of that carbon dioxide will be drawn [back] down by plants growing again," says Rebecca Buchholz, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Colo. "For fires, it's all about balance."

But there are concerns that balance is shifting.

Climate impacts the fires, and the fires can potentially impact climate. Rebecca Buchholz, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research

Climate change is causing wildfires to burn more frequently and severely around the world. It's increasing the areas that fires can burn, and the length of time in which fire conditions exist.

A 2018 "State of the Climate" report by Australia's leading research agency and Bureau of Meteorology found that there has been a "long-term increase in extreme fire weather and in the length of the fire season across large parts of Australia since the 1950s."

At the same time, the world is getting hotter, precipitation patterns are shifting, and human development is expanding. All that is making it harder for some forests to regrow.

"We could be changing the atmosphere with fossil fuels in such a way that fires in landscape ecosystems go from being neutral or harmless, in terms of climate, to something that is destructive," says Bob Yokelson, a researcher and professor at the University of Montana.

In that scenario, wildfire would become a bigger source of climate-warming emissions, adding to the growing amount that humans are pumping into the atmosphere, thus making future fires worse. Scientists call this a positive feedback loop.

It's too soon to say whether the fires in Australia will end up being a net source of carbon, or if areas will be able to regrow. But it's clear that what's happening now in the country is worrisome.

"Climate impacts the fires, and the fires can potentially impact climate, and we don't know where we're going," says Buchholz, who is from Australia and has spent the last few weeks there avoiding the oppressive smoke. "It's a moving goal post all the time, and we haven't reached that new balance point."

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/12/79466520 ... -emissions

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