Yearly Archives: 2017

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17 April 2017, The Guardian Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet. Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau. Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over. But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington. Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F). But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet. Read More here

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12 April 2017, SMH – John Pilger, Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, such as Australia, abandons its independence for an “alliance” with an unstable superpower. The United States is at a critical moment. Having exported its all-powerful manufacturing base, run down its industry and reduced millions of its once-hopeful people to poverty, the principal American power today is brute force. When Donald Trump launched his missile attack on Syria ‒ following his bombing of a mosque and a school ‒ he was having dinner in Florida with the President of China, Xi Jinping. The attack on Syria was clearly, above all, to show his detractors and doubters in Washington’s war-making institutions ‒ the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress ‒ how tough he was and prepared to risk a war with Russia. He had spilt blood in Syria, a Russian protectorate; he was surely now on the team. The attack was also meant to say directly to Xi, his dinner guest: this is how we deal with those who challenge the top dog. China has long received this message. In its rise as the world’s biggest trader and manufacturer, it has been virtually encircled by 400 US military bases ‒ a provocation described by a former Pentagon strategist as “a perfect noose”. This is not Trump’s doing. In 2011, the then president Barack Obama flew to Australia to declare, in an address to parliament, what became known as the “pivot to Asia”: the biggest build-up of US air and naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the Second World War. The target was China. America had a new and entirely unnecessary enemy. Today, low-draft US warships, missiles, bombers and drones operate on China’s doorstep. In July, one of the biggest US-led naval exercises ever staged, the biennial Operation Talisman Sabre, will rehearse a blockade of the sea lanes through which run China’s commercial lifelines. Based on an Air-Sea Battle Plan for war with China, which prescribes a “blinding” attack, this “war game” will be played by Australia. Read More here

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12 April 2017, Nature, Antarctica’s sleeping ice giant could wake soon. The massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet looks stable from above — but it’s a dangerously different story below. These first direct observations confirmed a fear that researchers had long harboured: that warm waters from the surrounding ocean can sneak underneath the floating glacier tongue and eat the ice away from below1. “This could explain why Totten has been thinning in the past few decades,” says Rintoul. Findings such as these are revealing some scary truths about East Antarctica — the vast, remote landmass to the east of the Transantarctic Mountains (see ‘Ice king’). This region is about as big as the entire United States and the majority of it stands on a high plateau up to 4,093 metres above sea level, where temperatures can plunge to −95 °C. Because the East Antarctic Ice Sheet seems so cold and isolated, researchers thought that it had been stable in the past and was unlikely to change in the future — a stark contrast to the much smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has raised alarms because many of its glaciers are rapidly retreating. In the past few years, however, “almost everything we thought we knew about East Antarctica has turned out to be wrong”, says Tas van Ommen, a glaciologist at the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, near Hobart. By flying across the continent on planes with instruments that probe beneath the ice, his team found that a large fraction of East Antarctica is well below sea level, which makes it more vulnerable to the warming ocean than previously thought. The researchers also uncovered clues that the massive Totten glacier, which holds about as much ice as West Antarctica, has repeatedly shrunk and grown in the past2 — another sign that it could retreat in the future. Read More here

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10 April 2017, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data. ‘Last year was bad enough, this is a disaster,’ says one expert as Australia Research Council finds fresh damage across 8,000km. Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover. Australia’s politicians have betrayed the Great Barrier Reef and only the people can save it | David Ritter Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km. The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed.Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event. Mass bleaching – a phenomenon caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures – has occurred on the reef four times in recorded history. Prof Terry Hughes, who led the surveys, said the length of time coral needed to recover – about 10 years for fast-growing types – raised serious concerns about the increasing frequency of mass bleaching events. “The significance of bleaching this year is that it’s back to back, so there’s been zero time for recovery,” Hughes told the Guardian. “It’s too early yet to tell what the full death toll will be from this year’s bleaching, but clearly it will extend 500km south of last year’s bleaching.” Read more here