2014 Earth's warmest year on record - but we are air conditioned

"The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2014 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA

Coal powered air conditioners rattle through suburbia, shops and malls. All doors are wide open to invite possible customers in. People and pets are advised to stay indoors in the land of the great outdoors.  Livestock are precooked on treeless paddocks. Wildlife will have to manage somehow. The media disseminates images of beaches with jolly beach bodies cooling down before racing back to their ac suv to carry them to the next cool location.

Houses seem to be built for another geographical region, but not Australia.  After 100s of years they have not come to terms with the climate, let alone unhinged catastrophic climate change.

" ..You see the same housing design from Hobart to Emerald to even Darwin, and that's madness... Australia's houses are poorly adapted to extremes of temperature. Houses with little shade, green space or surrounding trees, and with dark roofs and low ceilings, mean that the only way to cool them is to turn on the air-conditioning", Dr Hanna, Ecomagazine

Whatever the seemingly temporary dwelling is, just bang a legionnaires disease dripping air conditioner on it and 'she'll be right'. Should there be a blackout it is always handy to blame possum for dark malls and melting businesses where nothing goes without electronic gadgets.

Stay cool Bellingen

"Historically in Australia, more people die from heatwaves than they do from any other type of natural disaster," Professor Steffen

Leaving the habitable planet option behind, out of control fires rage over the country. While the climate is "getting out of control", Australia chooses to stick its head into the hot beach sand and tolerate the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.

 "About 10 per cent of fires are lit by children." Dr Janet Stanley, Monash University, abc

Images:
'Stay cool' Bellingen CBD, where local motorists turn the park into a car park
Blackout, eu

Heatwaves, blackouts and infrastructure breakdown, CSIRO
Hot and bothered: our health under climate change, ECOS
Urban areas see more heat waves, environmental research web


More readings on the 'life style' of bankruptcy
Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945

Climate wars

As an update on climate reading, here is some very informative climate listening.

The book:
Climate Wars, by Gwynne Dyer reads:

"From one of the world’s great geopolitical analysts, a terrifying glimpse of the none-too-distant future, when climate change will force the world’s powers into a desperate struggle for advantage and even survival.

Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead, and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Prescient, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research and interviews, Climate Wars promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years."

Listen to part 1 (2, 3) by Gwynne Dyer

Image:
Boat of Environmental migrants/ climate refugees fleeing the effects of catastrophic climate change and environmental degradation.

Update:
Failure to address global warming could lead to war, F. Hollande at G20, reuters 161114

Drought in the Bellinger Valley

The Bellinger Valley is experiencing the driest Spring in 43 years. abc

"Australia in the middle of its hottest-ever year...The next six months are going to be unusually hot, dry and risky." The Conversation 

Update:
North Coast enduring driest conditions in more than a century. Average rainfall was the lowest since 1901 in the region from Coffs Harbour in the south to Bundaberg in the north. abc 110814

Creating an inhospitable ecosystem on Earth

We have maneuvered our hospitable planet into turbulent and chaotic property changes. In the anthropocene we have profoundly modified the Earth’s landscape. Human activities are creating an inhospitable ecosystem for human biomes and the biosphere at large.

The diy catastrophic climate breakdown is due to the addiction to burning fossil fuels. We are racing into a 4 degrees Celsius scenario, although it is known that fossil fuels need to stay unburned to meet climate target of 2°C. Some engage in pathological denial and are willfully blind to it resuming business-as-usual. For some it's enough to have a “change of government and climate change just disappears!”

There will be a legacy from the ones that “dig it up, ship it out and let it burn” - an out of control array of fire 'incidents', droughts, record intense heatwaves, floods, an 11-cyclone season, sea level rise and a dead, acid ocean.

Climate disruption will have severe implications for Australia's already challenged biodiversity conservation and protected areas. "Rates of extinction of species are likely to increase as the global average temperature rises by just 1.0 or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and likely to accelerate sharply as temperature rises beyond 2 degrees Celsius."

Land degradation as usual continues with clearing, logging and slash and burn. The fossil-fuel-powered culture of sprawl, mining, plantations and pastoralism munches its way through all Australian biomes.

Fear of mega fire storms
There is a tendency to reclassify all bush/ native vegetation as fuel that needs incinerating with so that it cannot burn in the future. Backburning often leads to out-of-control blazes. Hazard reductions take place in nature refuges around cities and ever growing settlements in bushfire-prone areas. Arsonists and thoughtless cigarette tossers do their bit.

It is soothing to know ...

That Australia's 25,000 plant species have found a safe habitat in perpetuity in the freezer.

That Australian wildlife threatened by climate change will be relocated.

That "a refusal to implement the Kyoto Protocol or do something about CO2...calls for a new approach to deal with people displaced by climate change." Both overseas and local climate refugees.

That there is a "fires near me" app.

Images:
Public transport station

Updates:
The refusal to make the link between the fires and climate change will condemn more people to the inferno The Guardian
Heed the warnings on the new climate reality, The Guradian