Get ready for more climate change hysteria. Australia’s chief scientist has said that Australia is set to face a tough fire season (all seasons are tough). Thus, Australia need s to cut carbon emissions by eight times the present rate. Why eight times, why not ten or 80? I suppose that this is in the same news cycle as the fires in Hawaii, so a climate change spin is added. But, a counter from US writer Brett Stevens is below, where the fires in Hawaii are more a product of mismanagement, lack of clearing, and lack of adequate fire prevention rather than climate change.
How the required cuts can be made, is not detailed. Perhaps just abandon modern life?
“Australia's chief scientist Cathy Foley has issued a stark warning on climate change during an appearance on Q+A.
Key points:
- Concerns were raised that Australia could face a tough fire season
- Australia's chief scientist says carbon production needs to be cut by eight times the current rate
- Politicians were called on to do more than simply create plans on how to tackle climate change
With wildfires having razed Maui's historic Laihaina town, resulting in the deaths of nearly 100 people in an area not usually prone to fire, Dr Foley said the incident should act as a further warning that action, not planning, was needed now.
"It is really tragic, seeing what has happened in Hawaii," Dr Foley said.
She then added that with fires occurring more frequently across the globe, including in Greece and Canada, governments must act on the science.
"This [fires] is a consequence of it and that's really requiring governments to make decisions."
"They've got a plan — well, they are working on continuing to have plans, we have a target.
"There is a realisation that we've got to do something fast, an energy transition at a rate that we have never seen before.
"This will have a huge impact not just on governments making decisions, but everyone will have to think about the way we live."
Asked if governments were moving fast enough on action to affect climate change, Dr Foley answered in the negative before calling for a dramatic increase in carbon reduction.
"At the moment the requirement is we need to be reducing by 16 megatons of carbon a year, we are doing two, we need to increase by eight times," she said.
Other panellists then implored people to not see some of the world's most iconic cities covered in an orange haze as the new normal.
Comedian and author Adam Spencer backed up Australia's chief scientist as he called for immediate action.
"Remember three years ago those iconic images of the Harbour Bridge, you couldn't see it because of the smoke and that shocked the world," Spencer said.
"Celeste Barber raised $52 million from an assortment of Hollywood stars and The People's Alliance for Justice.
"She got so much money, she didn't know what to do with it, the world was shocked.
"What has happened in Hawaii is tragic, but no-one is surprised.
"When you just have the hottest day, hottest week and the hottest month ever measured, you can't pretend to be surprised by what's happening in Hawaii.
"I don't know what else scientists could do to tell the story of: 'Look here, people. Look at the data, look at the graphs, look at the models, look at the mathematics, look at the projections. This is all going in one direction'.
Spencer then said people were getting complacent about climate change but that "the clock is genuinely ticking now".
'Long-term issue'
Asked if we had reached the point of being complacent about global warming, science journalist Angela Saini said she hoped not.
"I was there [New York] when the sky went orange and that was pretty scary," Saini said.
"We see it on the news all the time and suddenly it is the new normal."
Saini said one of the major problems with addressing climate change was that governments adopted a model of short-term thinking to get themselves elected, and argued that had to change.
"The problem with climate change ... because it is a long-term issue ... the way that democracies work, obviously is they are not thinking in the long-term ways, they are just thinking about, "how can I make sure that I win the next election'.
"Those big decisions just aren't being made when they need to be made.
"That inability to think, to act long-term, I think, could be what destroys us ultimately.
"Why are we not acting?"
That comment got the panel talking on whether politicians needed to think more about long-term problems, rather than short-term political gain.
Former ABC managing director and current Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Mark Scott, said the summer to come may cause politicians here to think about the need to hasten climate change policy.
"You think of what has happened in Hawaii and you think of what has happened in the United States and you anticipate the Australian summer to come," he said.
"There has been so much rain, so much growth and now it is drying out very quickly and you look at the heat there in the northern hemisphere, it feels terribly ominous.
"I think that puts an imperative on political leaders to look beyond the immediate and short-term and engage more fully in the tough decision-making that climate change really demands."
https://www.amerika.org/politics/let-maui-burn/
“Right now we are seeing horrific wildfires in Maui, Hawaii. While any normal person will feel empathy for those suffering, nature offers a better form of fairness than anything humans can: the predictability of events, after having observed them enough.
Like most diversity-run places, Maui seems to have a failure of crucial systems. No one removed excessive vegetation build-up in the middle of a drought, the wildfire warning system failed, and local services seem to have bungled almost all of the response.
Diversity pits groups against each other, which means that people who take positions of power do so to advance their group, not to fulfill the role of the institution that has employed them. Consequently basic functions fail because the society no longer has a center and is entirely individualistic.
Whites make up less than a third of the population. This means that they are dominated by the swing vote provided by the diversity voters, who promptly elect candidates who are favorable to their agenda at the expense of any shared agenda the society as a whole once had.
It turns out that the wildfires were probably a preventable crisis:
An unknown spark quickly set parts of the island ablaze on Aug. 8, sending flames fueled by a combination of strong trade winds and a landscape parched by drought conditions through the historic Lahaina district and people’s homes.
The main factor driving the fires involved the invasive grasses that cover huge parts of Hawaii, which are extremely flammable, Frazier said.
Although drought contributed to the severity of the fires, anthropogenic climate change is not to blame for Maui’s drought conditions either. Drought is not uncommon in Hawaii, which is currently in its dry season. Parts of Maui, including much of the island’s west coast, are currently under severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
This seems unthinkable for a place that is awash in tourist dollars. You have to work hard to go broke as a vacation destination like Hawaii, but somehow this diversity zone has failed to take care of itself, most likely because the money went to diversity and anti-poverty (socialist) programs instead.
And yet, swamped in resentment, Maui seems to be more known for hating the hand that feeds it:
“It’s all butterflies and rainbows when it comes to the tourism industry,” said a 21-year-old Maui native and an employee at the hotel who asked to remain anonymous. “But what’s really under it is kind of scary.”
But the opposition to tourists is not without complications given the island is economically reliant on those travellers. The Maui Economic Development Board has estimated that the island’s “visitor industry” accounts for roughly four out of every five dollars generated here, calling those visitors the “economic engine” of the county.
“You’re kind of raised to hate tourists,” said the young hotel worker. “But that’s really the only way to work on the islands. If it’s not hospitality then it’s construction.”
In other words, we see a typical diversity place, which means a cruel place: the diversity is dependent upon the majority, which having a higher average IQ, outperforms it economically, socially, and politically. Consequently diversity politics turn to resentment.
Resentment means sinecures, or people using their positions of power to enrich themselves because they see their ethnic community as the group they serve, not the society at large. While diversity is obviously paradoxical, few understand how much internal conflict it brings.
As if a metaphor for diversity, it seems the blazes were fueled by invasive species that the local diversity politics failed to remove:
While factors such as extreme weather events from climate change and the state’s local power grid have been blamed for helping to cause the blaze, large plots of land in Hawaii have been overrun by volatile non-native fire-prone grasses that are fueling the deadly flames, according to experts.
Land that was once occupied by irrigated pineapples and sugar cane was taken over by the grass species as those businesses began to decline, according to Elizabeth Pickett, the co-executive director of the Hawaii Wildlife Management Organization.
The grasses, which are fast-growing when it rains and drought-resistant when it’s drier, only persisted after wildfires spread across the islands in 2018.
At the time, Clay Trauernicht, a specialist in wildland fire science and management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, sounded the alarm in a letter to the Maui News after the fires destroyed 21 homes.
In other words, there was plenty of warning here, but diversity government was more interested in paying subsidies to the various diversity groups and funding its bureaucrats than it was at doing its job. Again we see the failure of herd self-rule.
Diversity simply makes this worse because internal divisions divide the population into warring special interest groups, making the existing problem of lobbying and dark organization even worse.”