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.
