Tag: flash flooding

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Global Authoritarian Revolution? “… young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity …”

World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say

Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America

Jonathan Watts @jonathanwatts Sat 30 Dec 2023 01.26 AEDT

The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.

…

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

…

Now director of the climate programme at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was for a generational shift of leadership. “The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.

…Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis

James Hansen has a track record when it comes to talking up authoritarianism – who can forget Hansen’s absurd praise of the Chinese system in 2015, for the alleged advantage of Chinese Communism over Western democracies and republics, when it comes to addressing climate challenges?

“I think we will get there because China is rational,” Hansen says. “Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don’t deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It’s so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it’s not a hoax. But they will need co-operation.”Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud

Not that I’m denying this has been an interesting weather year in Australia.

The Aussie MET predicted dry conditions because of El Nino, and there have been dry periods, but there have also been some exceptional rainfall events, lots of water falling in normally dry inland areas in June and December, and probably other events I’ve forgotten.

This is likely just random chance – Australia is famed for its extreme weather, and weather forecasting in Australia is just as big a joke as most other places.

But what if the unusual El Nino rainfall in Australia is because of global warming? What if the “new normal” is fewer prolonged droughts, more chaotic weather with shorter dry spells, and more rain, including in the parched interior of Australia?

In that case we would all be better off cancelling useless solar panels and wind turbines, and investing in flood and water management project, to mitigate the harm when a small ocean drops on our heads. And people could mitigate their own personal risks, by avoiding purchasing in dubious housing estates which look suspiciously like filled in river valleys, ditching the EVs and useless town automobiles, and instead buying long range diesel 4WD vehicles to better handle Australia’s increasingly neglected and flood prone roads, and increasingly unreliable, power cut prone fuel supplies.

Purchasing a 4WD diesel in Australia is becoming more a necessity than a choice, especially if you plan to do any rural driving. My recent Aussie driving holiday, I saw some truly appalling roads. A recent Grattan Institute Report found roads in Australia are full of potholes, in a poor state of repair. On my holiday there were lots of towns with no fuel, because of recent road or electricity disruptions.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the towns I saw were friendly, we have good memories of visiting the Australian outback. But there was an exception. At one particularly remote toilet stop in far Western NSW I saw someone repairing an EV charger, in a boarded up town with lots of drunk aboriginals. I’ve since learned the town features in reports about places with intractable drug and alcohol issues. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, but during the 5 minutes we stopped for a quick toilet break, two teenage boys did separate walk by reconnaissance of my 4WD. I can take a hint, they weren’t very subtle about what they were doing. But if an EV driver attempted my route, with all the big distances between outback towns, there aren’t a lot of other options for a recharge in places that remote.

The EV charger repair guy was happy. He was making a fortune being paid to repair that one EV charging station on a regular basis, he told me the kids kept vandalising it. He kept the back of his van locked while he was doing his repair. I did actually see one EV on my trip, heading in the opposite direction towards that town. Lets hope they got lucky.

Even in Sydney road quality seems to be deteriorating. I witnessed a respectable Darwin Award entry, council workers waste deep in rushing floodwaters in Sydney trying to clear the grating of a large blocked drain with a pry bar, during the middle of a deluge. The drains I saw exposed above the flood didn’t look well maintained, and more than one drain had blown out its grating and was gushing water, because the downstream pipe was blocked. I bet those workers I saw bashing the drain grating in the middle of a flood wished their council had spent more money on drain maintenance before it started raining, instead of squeezing the road maintenance budgets so they could blow taxpayer cash on climate posturing, or whatever other nonsense caught the attention of incompetent local politicians.

I think James Hansen got one thing right, 2023 will be looked back on as a turning point, but it won’t be the year of children leading the global authoritarian climate revolution James Hansen seems to want. Instead, especially if we actually did breach 1.5C for much of this year. 2023 will be looked back on as the year the wild exaggerations of climate alarmists were exposed, the year people realised they should just go about their daily lives, do what is right for their families, buy a rugged automobile which can handle our poorly maintained roads, vote for politicians who get the basics right, like road maintenance, and ignore the perennially wrong climate prophets of doom.

If you think I’m exaggerating about the state of Australia’s roads, the following is a video I shot earlier this year on the Fraser Coast. Do any of these roads look EV ready?