12 August 2017, New York Times, Portugal Forest Fires Worsen, Fed by Poor Choices and Inaction. When Portugal’s deadliest wildfire killed more than 60 people in June not far from the hamlet where Daniel Muralha lives, it was just the pensioner’s latest brush with death. 2003, Mr. Muralha, 77, narrowly survived a huge forest fire that engulfed his house. In 2015, a fire destroyed his field. And this July, he watched anxiously as fire burned the trees above his property. fires are getting worse and worse, which means this place is going to become a desert,” he said. “I’m too old to move elsewhere, but more people, of course, decide to leave after every fire.” What he describes is an increasingly urgent problem for his country. Hotter, drier summers are setting off more forest fires, which are accelerating a decades-old migration from rural areas, leaving lands untended. That, in turn, helps fuel new and more intense fires that spread and burn even faster. deadly spiral, forestry experts and environmentalists say, has been worsened by political inaction, a history of poor land management and the prioritizing of firefighting over fire prevention, even in the face of more frequent tragedies. But Portugal has become a particularly stark case of what the future may hold if changes to land, climate and economies go mismanaged. The deaths in June provoked a fresh round of soul-searching and spurred an investigation, still continuing, into how and why the wildfire engulfed Pedrógão Grande, about 10 miles from where Mr. Muralha lives, close to Oleiros. Oleiros and its environs are a prime example of the changes to the landscape that have rendered Portugal ever more vulnerable to fire. Read More here
Monthly Archives: August 2017
9 August 2017, The Conversation, Southeast Europe swelters through another heatwave with a human fingerprint. Parts of Europe are having a devastatingly hot summer. Already we’ve seen heat records topple in western Europe in June, and now a heatwave nicknamed “Lucifer” is bringing stifling conditions to areas of southern and eastern Europe. Several countries are grappling with the effects of this extreme heat, which include wildfires and water restrictions. Temperatures have soared past 40℃ in parts of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, with the extreme heat spreading north into the Czech Republic and southern Poland. Some areas are having their hottest temperatures since 2007 when severe heat also brought dangerous conditions to the southeast of the continent. The heat is associated with a high pressure system over southeast Europe, while the jet stream guides weather systems over Britain and northern Europe. In 2007 this type of split weather pattern across Europe persisted for weeks, bringing heavy rains and flooding to England with scorching temperatures for Greece and the Balkans. Read More here
9 August 2017, The Guardian, Glencore’s Wandoan coalmine wins approval from Queensland government. Glencore’s multibillion-dollar Wandoan coalmine proposal has been granted mining leases years after it was shelved amid falling commodity prices and a ramped-up global response to climate change. On Tuesday Queensland’s natural resources and mines minister, Dr Anthony Lynham, approved three 27-year leases covering 30,000 hectares for the first stage of its $7bn mine near Roma. Doubts about the future of the Wandoan mine had lingered since 2012, amid falling thermal coal prices and a poor market outlook. The approval has enraged environmental groups, who say the government is prioritising a flailing coal industry over communities and putting the state’s agricultural industry at further risk. “For many years local farmers have been fighting this coalmine,” an Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman, Jason Lyddieth, said on Wednesday. “We know that digging up coal and burning it is polluting our air and fuelling climate change. “The Queensland government needs to get serious about preparing for a carbon pollution-free world. It needs to get serious about our water, our land and our air.” Greenpeace said the approval showed the government was more interested in propping up the fossil fuel industry than protecting communities and the environment. “We can either have a healthy planet and thriving Great Barrier Reef or we can have new coalmines, not both,” said a climate and energy campaigner, Nikola Casule. “Our politicians must abandon their coal fetish and instead harness the renewable energy revolution to protect Australian communities and position Australia as an industry leader in this rapidly growing sector.” Read More here
9 August 2017 By Dr Haydn Washington for Dick Smith Fair Go,The Insanity of Endless Growth, . The world is faced with a predicament of grave enormity – yet one rarely spoken of. The United Nations (UN), almost all governments, business, and media and both the political Left and the Right are busy extolling (even praising) ‘endless growth’. Yet we live on a finite planet, so clearly endless physical growth is impossible, unsustainable and, in fact, insane. I often give public talks on sustainability and ask the audience: ‘On a finite planet who thinks we can keep growing physically forever?’ Nobody raises their hands. So why then is our economy and society based on what many individually know is impossible? An excellent question – but one hardly ever asked in mainstream economics (Daly, 2014). Even the UN forgets to ask the question – and to answer it. Read More here