1990 Gigagrams - 582,753.55
2000 Gigagrams - 554,406.65
2010 Gigrgrams - 563,792.35
2006 Gigagrams - 611,503.67 - highest year
1995 Gigagrams - 499,038.23 - lowest year
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Australia, where rivers are drying up, reefs are dying, and fires and floods are ravaging the continent
October 3, 2011
By Jeff Goodell
It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."...
Premier Anna Bligh issued a stark warning to Queenslanders as Yasi approached the coast, saying it had the potential to be the biggest cyclone the state had ever seen.
"This storm is huge and it is life-threatening," Ms Bligh warned. "Being well prepared is our best defence."
People in all low-lying and waterfront areas between Cairns and Mackay were told to relocate, with large storm surges expected to accompany the cyclone.
Flights out of north Queensland filled up quickly as thousands of people evacuated; businesses closed down and many patients in local hospitals and nursing homes were relocated. Other residents simply battened down the hatches to ride out the storm.
By Jeff Goodell
It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.
I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."...
Premier Anna Bligh issued a stark warning to Queenslanders as Yasi approached the coast, saying it had the potential to be the biggest cyclone the state had ever seen.
"This storm is huge and it is life-threatening," Ms Bligh warned. "Being well prepared is our best defence."
People in all low-lying and waterfront areas between Cairns and Mackay were told to relocate, with large storm surges expected to accompany the cyclone.
Flights out of north Queensland filled up quickly as thousands of people evacuated; businesses closed down and many patients in local hospitals and nursing homes were relocated. Other residents simply battened down the hatches to ride out the storm.
Atmospheric Oxygen Levels are Decreasing (click here)
Oxygen levels are decreasing globally due to fossil-fuel burning. The changes are too small to have an impact on human health, but are of interest to the study of climate change and carbon dioxide. These plots show the atmospheric O2 concentration relative to the level around 1985. The observed downward trend amounts to 19 'per meg' per year. This corresponds to losing 19 O2 molecules out of every 1 million O2 molecules in the atmosphere each year.
The Great Barrier Reef has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
By Richard Shiffman
Scientists are reporting the second mass bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef in the last year. In a Yale Environment 360 interview, researcher Terry Hughes says these events have damaged two-thirds of the world’s largest coral reef and are directly caused by global warming.
The Great Barrier Reef, (click here) which stretches for more than 1,400 miles off Australia’s northeastern coast, has been called the largest living structure on earth. But the journal Nature reported last month that the reef is rapidly becoming the world’s largest dying structure. This assessment was based on a survey led by biologist Terry Hughes, the director of the Arc Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland Australia. Hughes and his colleagues found that two-thirds of the northern sector of the reef has been badly damaged by a massive bleaching event that occurred over a period of several months last year....
...In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Hughes lays the blame for the recent destruction in the Great Barrier Reef squarely on warming waters caused by climate change. The catastrophic damage to Australia’s reefs is part of a global phenomenon that is threatening the survival of coral worldwide, Hughes says, and is a clear warning that we need to rein in greenhouse gas emissions: “We simply cannot afford to continue with business as usual. We are very concerned that these events are getting more frequent. The reef simply won’t come back if we have a bleaching event every other year.”...
The technology is sound. The financial viability is an issue.
Perhaps Iceland's expertise should be explored to secure these important projects.
By Loz Blain
...Australia (click here) is sitting on top of some of the world's most potent geothermal energy sources, according to government estimates. Just one percent of the hot rock energy less than 5 km under the surface would be enough to meet the whole country's entire power needs for 26,000 years if it was tapped. So why aren't we seeing more movement on it?
Geothermal energy is a very handy, virtually inexhaustible clean energy source for those areas lucky enough to find themselves on top of it. Massive amounts of hot rock just below the Earth's surface can be used to heat water and drive steam turbines for reliable electricity generation with virtually no emissions or environmental impact....
There is a lot of discrimination in energy production. Australia subsidizes their fossil fuel industries with $4 billion annually.
30 August 2016
By Tom Fedorowytsch
A potential energy source in Australia (click here) is set to remain untapped, with a geothermal power project in the far north of South Australia now closed.
Energy company Geodynamics closed and remediated the sites of several test wells and generation plants in the Cooper Basin after deciding they were not financially viable.
Before the closure, the company had managed to extract super-heated water from five kilometres below the earth's surface and use it to generate small amounts of electricity.
"The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create," Geodynamics chief executive Chris Murray said.
Professor Martin Hand ran the South Australian Centre for Geothermal Energy Research at the University of Adelaide....
There is a lot of discrimination in energy production. Australia subsidizes their fossil fuel industries with $4 billion annually.
30 August 2016
By Tom Fedorowytsch
A potential energy source in Australia (click here) is set to remain untapped, with a geothermal power project in the far north of South Australia now closed.
Energy company Geodynamics closed and remediated the sites of several test wells and generation plants in the Cooper Basin after deciding they were not financially viable.
Before the closure, the company had managed to extract super-heated water from five kilometres below the earth's surface and use it to generate small amounts of electricity.
"The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create," Geodynamics chief executive Chris Murray said.
Professor Martin Hand ran the South Australian Centre for Geothermal Energy Research at the University of Adelaide....
As Earth grows hotter, "The Grid" will become less reliable.
By Amy Bainbridge
There has been a big surge (click here) in the number of households installing solar panels, with March installations reaching their highest level in almost five years.
Warwick Johnston from energy consultancy firm Sunwiz crunched the numbers and said 91 megawatts of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems were installed during the month.
"March has been a very impressive month for 2017," he said.
"We already saw a surge starting to build up in 2016, and we were wondering if that was going to continue into 2017 and it really has just continued to skyrocket."
Queensland led the way, installing 25 megawatts of capacity, which is enough to power about 5,500 homes and businesses.
Installations were also up in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria.
Mr Johnston said the recent blackouts in South Australia were a factor in the rising demand....
Australia has always dedicated a part of their national budget to clean energy.
Well over a decade of national testing of renewables has lead to progressive movement toward more wind farms.
In 2016, (click here) Australia's wind farms produced 30.8 per cent of the country's clean energy and supplied 5.3 per cent of Australia's overall electricity during the year.
Five wind farms became operational in 2016, adding 44 turbines and just under 140 MW of generating capacity. These additional projects took the Australian wind industry to a total of 79 wind farms with a combined capacity of 4327 MW, made up of 2106 turbines. These figures place Australia 17th in the world for wind power.
Many states and territories have recognised the regional investment opportunities that wind energy offers, introducing a variety of measures to capture a slice of the pie.
The ACT Government conducted its final reverse wind auction in 2016, which will help it deliver Australia's most ambitious renewable energy target of 100 per cent by 2020.
The successful projects were Neoen's 109 MW Stage 3 Hornsdale Wind Farm based in South Australia, and Union Fenosa Wind Australia's 91 MW Crookwell 2 wind farm in New South Wales....
Since 2013, Australia's temperature has been tending to at least 1 degree Celsius above NORMAL. That is a permanent trend.
By Angus Whitley, Rebecca Keenan and Matthew Burgess
(Bloomberg) -- The road-melting heatwave (click here) that made Sydney the hottest place on Earth at the weekend may just be a taste of things to come.
Temperatures in Australia are set to rise until around 2050 due to greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere, according to the country’s weather bureau.
“Australia is one country where you really can see the signal of global warming,” Karl Braganza, the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, told reporters on a call. “We’ve locked the degree of warming in until mid-century and that means it’s likely that one of the next strong El Nino events in the coming decade or two will set a new record.”...
When the government is truly of, for and by the people.
By Gabrielle Chan
The Coalition government (click here) has recommitted to Australia’s emissions targets in the Paris agreement after Donald Trump’s withdrawal but Malcolm Turnbull faces internal division as conservative MPs celebrated the American decision.
The energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, said he was disappointed with Trump’s decision but reiterated the Turnbull government’s full commitment to the Paris deal.
“We reiterate our full commitment to the Paris Accord,” Frydenberg told the ABC. “We believe that the targets we agreed to, the 26% to 28% reduction in emissions by 2030 on 2005 levels are reasonable, are achievable....
February 24, 2010
The Black Saturday bushfires, were a series of bushfires that ignited or were burning across the Australian state of Victoria on and around Saturday 7 February 2009 during extreme bushfire-weather conditions, resulting in Australia's highest ever loss of life from a bushfire. 173 people died as a result of the fires and 414 were injured. As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of 7 February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday.
January 7, 2017
By Kristine Phillips
In the northeastern United States, (click here) temperatures dipped far into the negatives this week.
The streets of Boston were flooded with icy waters that carried dumpsters away. Cars in nearby Revere, Mass., were nearly buried in frozen floodwaters. Wind chills in parts of New Hampshire could hit 100 degrees below zero (That’s not a typo, as the New York Times points out).
In Australia, however, it’s summer — and a remarkably hot one. So hot that part of a freeway in Victoria on Australia’s southeastern coast was “melting.” Several hundred miles northeast, in the greater Sydney area, Australians spent Sunday in the most sweltering heat in nearly 80 years.
Such is the extreme weather greeting 2018 from opposite ends of the globe. As winter in the United States brought a historic “bomb cyclone” that unleashed heavy snow and days of bone-chilling winds to the East Coast, summer in Australia, particularly in the south and southeastern parts of the country, is delivering a “catastrophic” heat wave, with record temperatures hovering in the triple digits (Fahrenheit) and fires scorchingthousands of acres of dry lands.
Temperature in the Sydney suburb of Penrith reached 47.3 degrees Celsius (117.14 degrees Fahrenheit), just a bit short of surpassing the hottest day on record — 47.8 degrees Celsius (118.04 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1939, according to the Bureau of Meteorology....
...(Melting streets are not unheard of. It happened in India two years ago during a heat wave that killed thousands. Photos taken from New Delhi showed distorted road markings caused by melting asphalt.)...
11.01.18
Dead Flying Fox
US President Donald Trump (click here) may believe that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” but the fact of the matter is, it is real and planet Earth is witnessing the consequences of global climate change every day. One the one hand in the northern hemisphere, a place as hot as the Sahara Desert experienced snowfall recently and America has been hit with something scientists are calling a “Bomb Cyclone”, in the southern hemisphere, things have taken a turn for the hotter, and as a result, the wildlife is being affected.
On January 10, biologist Daniel Schneider tweeted about the mass death of bats in Australia. He wasn’t the only one. Dozens of news agencies and scientific journals have reported on this strange and horrifying phenomenon. The National Geographic magazine, on January 9, reported that Australia has been experiencing record high temperatures reaching over 46 degrees Celsius, and a direct result of that, apart from heat strokes in people and melting asphalt, was the death of more than 400 flying foxes (also known as fruit bats) at a local bat colony....
By Kristine Phillips
In the northeastern United States, (click here) temperatures dipped far into the negatives this week.
The streets of Boston were flooded with icy waters that carried dumpsters away. Cars in nearby Revere, Mass., were nearly buried in frozen floodwaters. Wind chills in parts of New Hampshire could hit 100 degrees below zero (That’s not a typo, as the New York Times points out).
In Australia, however, it’s summer — and a remarkably hot one. So hot that part of a freeway in Victoria on Australia’s southeastern coast was “melting.” Several hundred miles northeast, in the greater Sydney area, Australians spent Sunday in the most sweltering heat in nearly 80 years.
Such is the extreme weather greeting 2018 from opposite ends of the globe. As winter in the United States brought a historic “bomb cyclone” that unleashed heavy snow and days of bone-chilling winds to the East Coast, summer in Australia, particularly in the south and southeastern parts of the country, is delivering a “catastrophic” heat wave, with record temperatures hovering in the triple digits (Fahrenheit) and fires scorchingthousands of acres of dry lands.
Temperature in the Sydney suburb of Penrith reached 47.3 degrees Celsius (117.14 degrees Fahrenheit), just a bit short of surpassing the hottest day on record — 47.8 degrees Celsius (118.04 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1939, according to the Bureau of Meteorology....
...(Melting streets are not unheard of. It happened in India two years ago during a heat wave that killed thousands. Photos taken from New Delhi showed distorted road markings caused by melting asphalt.)...
Dead Flying Fox
US President Donald Trump (click here) may believe that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” but the fact of the matter is, it is real and planet Earth is witnessing the consequences of global climate change every day. One the one hand in the northern hemisphere, a place as hot as the Sahara Desert experienced snowfall recently and America has been hit with something scientists are calling a “Bomb Cyclone”, in the southern hemisphere, things have taken a turn for the hotter, and as a result, the wildlife is being affected.
On January 10, biologist Daniel Schneider tweeted about the mass death of bats in Australia. He wasn’t the only one. Dozens of news agencies and scientific journals have reported on this strange and horrifying phenomenon. The National Geographic magazine, on January 9, reported that Australia has been experiencing record high temperatures reaching over 46 degrees Celsius, and a direct result of that, apart from heat strokes in people and melting asphalt, was the death of more than 400 flying foxes (also known as fruit bats) at a local bat colony....
Australia is the sixth largest country in the world. (click here) Its ocean territory is the world's third largest, spanning three oceans and covering around 12 million square kilometres.
Nearly seven million square kilometres, or 91 per cent of Australia, is covered by native vegetation. Although this figure may seem high, many of Australia's desert landscapes are covered by native plants such as saltbush, albeit sparsely.
For tens of thousands of years, the lives and sense of cultural identity of Indigenous Australians were inextricably linked to the land, its forms, flora and fauna. Today, the identity of all Australians is shaped by a relationship with the natural environment.
Australia is one of the most urbanised and coast-dwelling populations in the world. More than 80 per cent of Australians live within 100 kilometres of the coast....
Suffrage, (click here) or the right to vote, is something that Australians have not always been able to take for granted. In 1902, Australia was the first country in the world to give women both the right to vote in federal elections and also the right to be elected to parliament on a national basis....
Australian National Athem
For we are young and free;
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts Of beauty rich and rare;
In history’s page, let every stage Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.
Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.
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