Lethal Heating: 01/08/20

08/01/2020

(AU) Craig Kelly And Piers Morgan In Tense Good Morning Britain Exchange Over Bushfires And Climate Change

ABC News - Stephanie Dalzell

Liberal MP Craig Kelly and Piers Morgan clash over bushfire crisis (ABC News)

Key points

Piers Morgan blasted the Liberal backbencher on air, telling him to "wake up"
Mr Kelly said the cause of the fires was the "build-up of fuel load and the drought"
Scott Morrison sought to reassure the public his Government accepted the link between climate change and natural disasters

Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly has defended his Government's handling of the bushfire crisis, during a combative UK television interview in which he argued the fires were caused by high fuel loads and not climate change.
Appearing on ITV's Good Morning Britain, Mr Kelly — who has long questioned whether the climate is indeed changing, and whether human activity has played a part — was grilled by outspoken British host Piers Morgan, who introduced him as a "climate change sceptic".
Mr Kelly nodded along during the introduction.
"You believe this has nothing to do with climate change, explain that," Piers Morgan began.
Mr Kelly replied: "Well Piers, you have to look at science and what our scientists are telling us.
"What causes the fires is the build-up of fuel load and the drought.
"To try to make out — as some politicians have — to hijack this debate, exploit this tragedy and push their ideological barrow, that somehow or another the Australian Government could have done something by reducing its carbon emissions that would have reduced these bushfires is just complete nonsense."
The Bureau of Meteorology has said climate change is influencing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia and other regions of the world.
Morgan blasted the Liberal backbencher on air, telling him to "wake up".
"Climate change and global warming are real, and Australia right now is showing the entire world just how devasting it is," Morgan said.
"For senior politicians in Australia to still pretend there's no connection is absolutely disgraceful."

Some Cobargo residents refused to shake Scott Morrison's hand, others hurled abuse at him. (ABC News)

Mr Kelly backed his decision to appear on the UK program in an interview with Radio National Breakfast host Tom Tilley.
"I went on that program to defend the Prime Minister, he was being attacked for what people were saying was a not-adequate response from Australia," Mr Kelly said.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said his reaction to Mr Kelly's comments that were aired in the UK was "one of despair".
"Despair, not just that Craig Kelly has those views and continues to advocate them — not just here in Australia, but globally, and be seen to be representing the Australian Government's position — but the knowledge that he's one of the people who has held back action," he said.
"He's one of the people who has stopped action on climate change domestically, which has led us to be in a position whereby we're actually, as well, arguing for less action internationally, rather than more."
As fires burn across the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been under pressure to develop a stronger climate change policy.
The Australian leader has also made global headlines for his handling of the bushfire crisis, with international media outlets watching the fires closely.
His confrontational meeting with angry residents — who heckled the Prime Minister and refused to shake his hand during the brief visit — in the bushfire-ravaged New South Wales town of Cobargo was streamed across the world.
The criticism has left Mr Morrison repeatedly seeking to reassure the public — both domestically and abroad — his Government accepts the link between climate change and natural disasters.
"I should stress that there is no dispute in this country about the issue of climate change globally, and its effect on global weather patterns, and that includes how that impacts in Australia," he said on Sunday.
And when asked later in the day what he would say to those around the world who were watching, he simply said: "Thank you very much for your support. Thank you."
Mr Kelly's senior Liberal colleagues are frustrated with the timing of this intervention, at a time when the Government is eager to highlight its $2 billion commitment to rebuilding towns devastated by the fires.
At a press conference in Canberra, Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud said Mr Kelly's views were not representative of the Government's position.
"Quite frankly, I've got better things to do than worry about what a backbencher goes and says on national TV," Mr Littleproud said.
"There's peoples' lives I'm trying to rebuild, there's 26 Australians who have lost their lives, I couldn't give a rats what he said, it's irrelevant.
"Let's just focus on those people who are out there who need our help, that's what we should be focused on. These tidbits on the sidelines, I couldn't care less about."

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(NYT) Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide

New York Times - Richard Flanagan

As record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.

Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and is the author, most recently, of the novel First Person.

BRUNY ISLAND, Australia — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.
All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning.
As I write, a state of emergency has been declared in New South Wales and a state of disaster in Victoria, mass evacuations are taking place, a humanitarian catastrophe is feared, and towns up and down the east coast are surrounded by fires, all transport and most communication links cut, their fate unknown.
An email that the retired engineer Ian Mitchell sent to friends on New Year’s Day from the small northern Victoria community of Gipsy Point speaks for countless Australians at this moment of catastrophe:

“All
we and most of Gipsy Point houses still here as of now. We have 16 people in Gipsy pt.
No power, no phone no chance of anyone arriving for 4 days as all roads blocked. Only satellite email is working We have 2 bigger boats and might be able to get supplies ‘esp fuel at Coota.
We need more able people to defend the town as we are in for bad heat from Friday again. Tucks area will be a problem from today, but trees down on all tracks, and no one to fight it.
We are tired, but ok.
But we are here in 2020!
Love
Us”

The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside:

“Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”

And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.
Since 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action.
In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory last year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia. Credit...Joel Carrett/EPA, via Shutterstock

Since Mr. Morrison, an ex-marketing man, was forced to return from his vacation and publicly apologize, he has chosen to spend his time creating feel-good images of himself, posing with cricketers or his family. He is seen far less often at the fires’ front lines, visiting ravaged communities or with survivors. Mr. Morrison has tried to present the fires as catastrophe-as-usual, nothing out of the ordinary.
This posture seems to be a chilling political calculation: With no effective opposition from a Labor Party reeling from its election loss and with media dominated by Rupert Murdoch — 58 percent of daily newspaper circulation — firmly behind his climate denialism, Mr. Morrison appears to hope that he will prevail as long as he doesn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster engulfing Australia.
Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating.
“Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. To which he might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure.
Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.

A man drags away plastic garbage bins from a property engulfed in flames in Lake Conjola in New South Wales. Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

More than one-third of Australians are estimated to be affected by the fires. By a significant and increasing majority, Australians want action on climate change, and they are now asking questions about the growing gap between the Morrison government’s ideological fantasies and the reality of a dried-out, rapidly heating, burning Australia.
The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.
Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a pregnant woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.”
As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?

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(AU) Foreign Media Rips Into Australia Over Causes Behind Bushfire Crisis

NEWS.com.au - Sam Clench

The rest of the world, still transfixed by Australia’s bushfire crisis, has warned we are trapped in a “spiral” – one partly of our own making.
The fires were mentioned multiple times during the Golden Globes today, with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Ellen DeGeneres, Patricia Arquette and Cate Blanchett chiming in with messages of support.

Hollywood stars have used their moments in the Golden Globes spotlight to highlight the bushfires ravaging Australia.

And overseas media outlets continue to dissect Australia’s response to the crisis – often in strikingly harsh terms.

The world has been horrified by Australia’s bushfires. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

According to The Atlantic, Australia is “caught in a climate spiral” partly of its own creation.

“Australia is buckling under the conditions that its fossil fuels have helped bring about. Perhaps the two biggest kinds of climate calamity happening today have begun to afflict the continent,” Robinson Meyer wrote.
Those two calamities are, first, the bushfires, and, second, the “irreversible scouring of the earth’s most distinctive ecosystems” – in our case, the Great Barrier Reef.
“Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change,” Meyer wrote.
“It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of liveable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future.
“Faced with such geographical challenges, Australia’s people might rally to reverse these dangers. Instead, they have elected leaders with other priorities.”
Much of the article focused on our reliance on coal exports for economic growth.
“Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal power, and it has avoided recession for the past 27 years in part by selling coal,” Meyer said.
“Australia will continue to burn, and its coral will continue to die. Perhaps this episode will prompt the more pro-carbon members of Australia’s parliament to accede to some climate policy. Or perhaps Prime Minister Morrison will distract from any link between the disaster and climate change, as President Donald Trump did when he inexplicably blamed California’s 2018 blazes on the state’s failure to rake forest floors.”
Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes during the California fires, which burned more than 700,000 hectares. Ninety-seven residents died.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Mr Trump said at the time.
“Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”
For the record, Mr Morrison has acknowledged the link between climate change and Australia’s current bushfires, though he has also said hazard reduction burning is the issue raised with him “most commonly” by fire-affected communities.
Meyer went on to speculate the fires could push Australia’s politics “in an even more besieged and retrograde direction”, empowering politicians to “fight any change at all”.
“And so maybe Australia will find itself stuck in the climate spiral, clinging ever more tightly to coal as its towns and cities choke on the ash of a burning world.”
Pessimistic stuff.

The Atlantic wrote that Australia was stuck in a ‘climate spiral’. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

Elsewhere, CNN’s Angela Dewan wrote a piece wondering whether Australia could afford to continue on its current trajectory.
“The devastation and persistent clouds of toxic smoke hanging over major towns and cities are begging the question, can Australia’s way of life go on?” she said.
“Australia’s political inaction on climate change can be hard to understand. Famous for its natural beauty, the country suffers annual fires and intense drought. It is regularly smashing heat records, and its rain patterns are becoming less predictable. Its seasons are beginning to look a little back to front.
“If Australians want to retain their quality of life, they must consider climate change policies that not only address fires but also other pollutants, such as traffic and industry.”
Dewan said Mr Morrison “should be worried” about what Australians think of him in towns like Cobargo, where he got such a hostile reception last week.
Furious locals, some of whom had lost their homes, shouted at Mr Morrison and refused to shake his hand. Their chief complaint was insufficient funding for the Rural Fire Service.

A heat map of Australia from Saturday when Penrith was the hottest place on earth. Picture: BSCH

The most strident critique of the Government, however, came from Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, writing for The New York Times under the apocalyptic headline: “Australia is committing climate suicide.”

“Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe,” Flanagan said.
“Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world heritage rainforests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
“Incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the fossil fuel industry, a big donor to both major parties – as if they were willing the country to its doom.
“While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports.
“The Prime Minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.”
Mr Albanese did voice his support for coal exports – to an extent – before departing on his Queensland tour last month.
“If Australia stopped exporting today there would not be less demand for coal – the coal would come from a different place,” he said.
“So it would not reduce emissions, which has to be the objective. I don’t see a contradiction between that and having a strong climate change policy.
“The proposal that we immediately stop exporting coal would damage our economy and would not have any environmental benefit.”
Flanagan continued his piece by citing a comment from Channel 10’s Hugh Riminton, saying Australia is a “burning nation led by cowards”.
“To which he might have added ‘idiots’, after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure,” he said.
“Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide.”
He finished with a remarkably provocative comparison between Australia’s current crisis and the Soviet Union in its final years.
“The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern,” Flanagan claimed.
“In Australia today a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.
“As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, ‘the system as we knew it became untenable’, he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?”

Links