No offence intended to the blue-footed booby here, but it currently displays more intelligence than our current political leadership of climate boobies. A climate booby is my new term for Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis denial, more plainly, climate change denial. Climate boobies are all at the same time fossil fuel smarty pants, and very stupid, loud, and dangerous. Well known examples are Malcolm Roberts, Barnaby Joyce, Craig Kelly, Tony Abbott, and Donald Trump. They deserve zero normal respect, and fully deserve the kind of respect that we might give to the criminal-insane.

On the Radio

Breakfast radio, on ABC radio national was this morning (Tuesday 26th September, 2017) had a couple of segments on the "Gas Crisis" in Australia. Since gas exports from the LNG facility at Gladstone started up, and even before then, we have had long term overseas gas contracts for rather low prices. This has coincided with domestic gas shortages and ridiculous high gas prices in Australia, leading to higher bills for everything. Local natural gas dependent manufacture industry now talks about shutting down because their costs are now too high. The Australian government claims to be on the job, with Prime Minister Turnbull meeting with our gas corporates, and holding over them the threat of gas export controls.

It is so funny that this was all predicted, and yet it all went ahead exactly as planned, and it was extra funny to hear Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce responding to the 'gas crisis' in another segment this morning in his best surprised booby panic mode.

Guaranteed Incompetence

This is the same government that got into power on the basis of abolishing a "carbon price" that was part of a orderly transition to a safer climate and more secure energy economy. As a climate activist I am really happy about the domestic high gas prices, which go far beyond what a "carbon price" could have managed, and I hope the gas dependent industries and their workers find safer climate ways to make a living. I am not happy that the cheaper long term gas supply contracts go to the manufacturing centres of our industrial competitors in Asia and beyond, and enable global carbon emissions to continue to rise. It is like our conservative politicians are all working for foreign fossil fuelled powers.

Our gas dependent local industries, involve something like 200,000 jobs, cannot get contracts for long term gas supply at 'reasonable' prices, are rightly peeved at our governments "plan" , perfectly designed for national industrial crippling, and expensive energy, and profits for the energy providers. Government incompetence is guaranteed when climate denial nonsense and games of mates has been allowed to lead the way.

Pop gun solutions

Another segment I heard on RN was the representative of the Australian Workers Union, describing the threat of export controls as a 'pop gun' solution, which would not solve the underlying problem of a tight domestic gas market, and that all those export contracts would need to be redone. There is no point in rationing our own gas supplies in the name of global warming, and saving a non-renewable resource, if we are giving most of it away far too cheaply overseas.

Some things are worth more than money

Yesterday, ABC RN featured Dr Johnathan Patz, a director of a "Global Health Institute" and an IPCC lead author.

He says cutting greenhouse gases and improving air quality could save between one to four million lives annually by 2050 — health benefits, he says, that will far outweigh the cost of investment in cleaner energy technologies. - Renewable energy health benefits outweigh financial cost

The hard gas gap

Cutting greenhouse gases and improving air quality might just save our not so distant descendants from extinction. All the other short term economic debates become irrelevant. We live on an "Earth System", whose global temperature and climate, and species arrangements, is set by first order level of control by the atmosphere levels of the greenhouse gas "carbon dioxide". Carbon dioxide gets well mixed throughout the atmosphere and ocean over a decade. It has been a global thermostat throughout this planet's geological ages, and I first read James Lovelock the theory of how the systems of "Gaia" have adjusted the thermostat downwards, the general levels of carbon dioxide, over the geological ages as compensation for the Sun's gradual increase in output as it has aged over billions of years. The total solar output is stable across human times, and has nothing much to do with our kick of global warming.

Kevin Anderson explains why wealthy countries must be carbon free by 2035 or many people will die.

No county is doing what’s required at the moment – anywhere near for 2°C. - Kevin Anderson - Carbon Budgets and Emissions Pathways

Our chances of avoiding climate crisis are slim to none, says leading climate scientist

Greenhouse boobies

We are responsible for the current, unprecedented, extraordinary fast, rise in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and cement production. We cannot continue for much longer if we continue to burn large amounts of fossil fuels. The physical systems of our planet have greenhouse gas "booby-traps", that are being rapidly triggered. The traps are rapid releases of naturally sequestered large quantities carbon dioxide and methane. We are the "greenhouse gas boobies" as rising temperatures trigger greenhouse booby traps. Robert Hunziker has just written this piece " Climate Armageddon Revisited.", which reminds our over-worn memories of the major climate booby traps now going off.

If you want to get a sense of justified alarmism, each booby trap is also an almighty big alarm. Other kinds of alarm are the extra-huge tropical storms that pick up energy from our extra warm oceans, and our extra-humid atmosphere. Or the bigger, hotter, more frequent and devastating forest and bush fires. Still ignoring it? You're a greenhouse booby.

Climate Emergency

Too much has been said about "politically correct" thinking. I want to hear more often, more "Climate Correct" thinking, especially on ABC RN. Here is a link to a web site, CEDAMIA  - "Climate Emergency Declaration and Mobilisation In Action" authored by Australians who want enough of us to have "Climate Correct" thinking. Sign their online petitions, aimed at all levels of government. Climate correct thinking starts with admitting there is a problem - a climate emergency.

CEDAMIA has the same view of the path that global warming is heading, that requires a climate emergency declaration, as the science paper that climate boobies Andrew Bolt and the Murdoch press are scared of.  These boobies felt they had to paint it as declaration of "the panic is over, the science was wrong", because it said we could actually do something about global warming if we really tried or really-truely panicked according to what the situation actually demands.

If enough people demand it, governments could declare a climate emergency tomorrow, and we could all get on with the job of fixing it.

   - CEDAMIA

Earth System Thinking Emergency

Like it or not, we have been stirring up the whole Earth System with greenhouse gases, and putting global climate into its high energy, destructive form. It would be really sad to lose both our own species, and the results of billions of years of evolution, because of a bunch of fossil fuel burning boobies. Anything capable of getting rid of us, is quite likely to get rid of mostly everything else. This constitutes the Anthropocene "rupture" from the past, which is no relation to the Christian ideas of "rapture" as this being the end of all time.

I am reading now another book by a great Australia author, Clive Hamilton, as we all have to consider if this great Anthropocene rupture with the past might be end of it all.   If anything, this book is a damming critique of our elites, intellectuals, media, and so-called thought leaders, although the author is really kind enough to say, that the anthropocene "rupture" has come on too fast for our cultural thinking processes to adapt. I don't think most of us understand, and I do not fully understand, just how big our predicament is. This in itself constitutes a thinking emergency. Reading the "Defiant Earth" has uncovered a few funny notions of my own.

Earth System wins, we either surrender or die

"Defiant Earth" contains an interesting story, and there are already several versions of it in our Noosphere of human thought. plenty of predecessors, and different takes on it, such as Bill McKibben's "Eaarth", and James Lovelock's "A Final Warning". James Lovelock came up with the "Gaia hypothesis", and later on, a simple "daisy world" model of the fundamental instability of earth climate system. Clive Hamilton directly referred to the recent "Facing the Anthropocene" by Ian Angus.

None of these publications have yet, nor are likely to change the current political leadership of climate boobies. Just how many publications of truth does it take to change a bad idea? Real change requires political pressure from all sides in large numbers, and all sides are still far too much into their own local issues, and do not seem able to cooperate to place the importance of the global Earth System above all other concerns that should seem petty in comparison.

All sides are dependent on a fossil fuelled global economy, and are not yet ready to abandon it to give the Paris climate treaty the strength, and severity, and the nature of extreme cooperation that is required.

The carbon emissions cap for extremely dangerous 2°C maximum global warming, or a safer 1.5°C are the hardest gas caps of all time. The Earth System climate is far bigger and more powerful than the human species can ever be, especially since all of our growth in power is from fossil fuels which have gone into making the Earth System more dangerous. This Earth System will throw everything back at us. It is past time to admit defeat and fast wean ourselves off fossil fuel power.