On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 10:10:24AM -0700, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Yes, Russ4, please give a sense of how things are from your point of view.
> Australia is one of the places that we think of going when things get really,
> REALLY, R E A L L Y bad here.
>
> Nick
>
Sort of like Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" I suppose. BTW my
grandfather actually knew him (by his real name Nevil
Norway). Actually looking up Nevil's wikipedia entry, they probably
were nearly neighbours. My grandfather lived just outside Pearcedale,
and Nevil's last years were spent at Langwarrin, the next district to
the North. They probably knew each other through the farming
community, and both being ex-Poms.
Back to the bushfires - these are like nothing anyone here has
experienced before. Whilst we've had bad fires before, they've all
been limited in both time and space. Bad for the people affected of
course, but generally forgotten about by the general population within
weeks. This is different. I would hazard a guess that more than 50% of
the population is affected, either directly or indirectly by poor air
quality. It has become a way of life to check the air quality app
before venturing outside, whether to go to work, shopping or
exercise. The smoke has even made its way across the Tasman and
affected some New Zealand cities. The only thing comparable I think
would be the 1997 Kalimantan fires in SE Asia.
Of course this was predicted as a consequence of climate change, that
we'd have increased drought and fires. And of course, our elected
buffoons are cut from the same cloth as the ones you have in the
US. Ten years ago, Australia had one of the first carbon taxes in the
world. Not really significant economically, and unlikely to have much
effect on fossil fuel use, but at least symbolically useful. That was
torn up by the conservative government elected on a platform of "there
is no climate change, burn baby burn". We've had a decade of
head-in-the-sand politics, with the energy industry screaming for some
policy certainty with respect to roll out of renewables and the
like. Instead, we get the government pleading with coal fired power
station operators to keep such stations open when the operators
decided to end-of-life them. It's madness.
And when given the clear choice between explicit policies to change
the energy infrastructure, not open new coal mines and some other
(fairly mild ISTM) tinkering around the edges of the tax system, and
on the other side "we have no policies, but watch out for Bill shock"
(yes the opposition leader was called Bill), people chose the "we have
no policies" government. Elections these days (perhaps always were)
simply a popularity contest, not a rational decision.
What is really disgusting is that once back in power, the PM actively
refused to meet with the fire chiefs back in April, who were warning
him of a bad upcoming bushfire season. Well I guess the ostrich got
his bum bitten by a lion. The silver lining in all of this is that
these fires affected so much of the population, that that should
fortify the PM to tell his rabid right wing to put a sock in it, and
proceed to develop policies for how to deal with climate change. IMHO,
the boat sailed 30 years ago for actually preventing climate change -
the best we can do is mitigate or slow it down, and secondly adapt.
Anyway - my opinion, but one that I suspect is currently quite widely shared.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
