Poor Australia

Who would have thought that Australia, one of the most advanced countries in the world, would be so backward on fighting climate warming. It is also ironic that this country has already suffered more than any other country the terrible effects of global climate change. The problem is mainly their archaic backward political system, which for example rewards companies for using taxpayer funds dedicated to fight climate change for building new coal-powered plants. Their specious reasoning is that the new plants will be more efficient and burn less coal than those being  replaced.  Even China, the world’s major polluter, has decided that “clean coal” plants as green technology investments. In Australia the rot starts at the top. The last 7 prime ministers were essentially climate change deniers, which caused a lot of political turnover  but no change  in policies. Australia is the world’s leading producer and exporter of coal.

Canada used to be my favorite country. It had ocean coasts, boreal forest, indigenous native people, and polite educated people. No more, however, Canada is the only modern country other than Australia that pretends to regard climate change as a  major global problem and yet has a ultra-massive project actually the size of Florida in pristine boreal forest in Alberta to mine shale oil, the most polluting oil ever at every stage of its production. Alberta is essentially a petro-state that produces immense amounts of the greenhouse gas, CO2. The climate scientists have stated that almost all known fossil fuel world-wide and especially tar sand oil in Canada  must remain in the earth if we want to limit global warming to “only”  2 degrees centigrade. At the current rate of CO2 production, the world is heading for a 5 degree warming, which will be a catastrophe for our civilization.  In fact, financial experts believe that all existing fossil fuel projects will become worthless due to the need to leave most if  not all fossil fuel deposits in the earth to limit climate warming.

Australia  is definitely the canary in the global mine to monitor the effect of climate warming. The summer of 2012-13 was the hottest summer since records started in 1910.  In fact, this was  called the “angry summer” and two new color categories had to be added to the weather maps to cover the temperature records set in every state.   It was also the greatest bush fire season in Australian history and the weather people coined a new term to describe these fires - catastrophic. Major flooding also occurred in Queensland and northern NSW caused by evaporating from the warmer ocean.

In order to limit the increase in global temperature increase to 2 degrees centigrade, it was hoped to limit the concentration of CO2 to 350 ppm. However the graph shown below shows that little has been accomplished and the CO2 concentration in June of 2018 was already 410.79 ppm.

The climate scientists point out that the world only has around 10  years left to stop the increase in CO2. And even if this is accomplished, the increase in global temperatures will continue rising due to heating of the ocean.