My guess is bumbling. I think there could be some conscience prickers like Sydney water rationing or bad coral bleaching. FWIW I think that Peak Oil in the 2020s could be more dire than climate dramas. I also think we can throw billions at renewable energy and still need fossil fuels. Think millions of electric cars needing an overnight charge in a foggy week.

IMO we need to replace the current coal capacity with equivalent nuclear, maybe 15 GW. If Albo becomes opposition leader it won't happen on his watch but Morrison will fudge the figures long before he approves nuclear. If this is right the 2020s will be a time of great anxiety...weather woes, unaffordable fuel or electric alternatives and dogma committed politicians. Coming soon.

Only Bob Hawke, with rare courage of conviction, was smart enough to know our future hs to be a nuclear one and we now know we have to do it in the next decade or else follow the Dodo!

Bob Hawke was he said, in favour of a nuclear waste dump right here in Australia for sound fiscal reasons and one of a handful of politicians guided by Common sense and pragmatism. And one of even a smaller handful who actually gave a rats for his fellow Australians and the greater world!

Heres the thing, we could if we but had leaders like Bob from either side of the aisle, develop MSR thorium and use this safest, walk away safe, CARBON-FREE, clean, cheap nuclear technology to burn the world's nuclear waste! And with technology so safe, I'd welcome one in my backyard.

Gamma radiation, scream braindead Green activists. Not understanding that nobody, but nobody, has ever, ever proposed running an unshielded reactor!

FUKUSHIMA AND CHERNOBYL scream their ecofascist club members, unable to comprehend that MSR stands for, molten salt reactor and something designed to very safely operate with a molten median which cannot melt down, given it is already molten!

And designed with passive safety features that automatically shut the whole process very safely down in the event of a power failure.

And use also as waste burners are able to power the world for over a thousand years and beyond while producing power for less than a cent PKWH!

Simply put, this technology and our adoption of it would allow us to more than halve our emissions and quite massively turbocharge our economy and become the world's powerhouse high tech manufacturing centre as the first consequence!

But as good as it could be, not available because those in charge have as always put self-interest and vested interest ahead of the national interest? Which would also come with increased coal mining and metals smelting Industrial expansion on a hitherto unimagined scale.

With the lowest carbon footprint in the developed world!
I kid you not!
Alan B.

Scenario Four.

For an increasingly disenfranchised portion of Australian society, climate change innovation is proving unbearably costly and imposing.

The answer lies in a housing bubble collapse, which according to many experts on that subject, is just around the corner.
This is where the genuine interest of middle class Australians is fixated.

Climate change and real estate values are tethered . One crashes, the other burns.

Dan

You totally missed the right solution Peter. You also seem to have missed the global warming election just past. Over half the population rejected the global warming scare to elect the more sane party to government.

First we should get rid of all bumbling sustainable development lecturers at Murdoch University & others, who have so little science & math that they are easily conned into believing bulldust.

Then we should silence all the silly little girl teachers, conned by those sustainable development lecturers, who are now brainwashing our kids in primary schools around the country in the false belief in CO2 caused global warming.

Then we should get ready for the cold times that are coming due to the low sun activity, exhibited by the low sunspot counts.

Yes Alan, of course we should go nuclear, although there is no sound scientific reason to reduce our usage of coal. I have not looked closely enough yet at various nuclear options to have any firm idea of which way, but the small plants used in US subs & carriers have a pretty good record to date.

I can't agree with you about Bob Hawk's courage. Yes he was a strong advocate for nuclear, until a Labor conference cane down on it in a big way. Wanting to become leader & ultimately PM he then totally shut up. His desire to become PM trumped his desire to do the best for the country. Still I guess there are very few without some such weaknesses, certainly none in our recently elected parliament.

With runaway warming and no meaningful response, the world spirals into chaos.

If Europe & the Middle east are anything to go by, I think people will annihilate each other before the Climate does !

How many times do I have to point out that climate change is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is that the world population has risen to an unsustainable level. We cannot cope with the current population of 7.8 billion, and if it rises to 12 billion, as current estimates forecast, we will be in desperate trouble.

To reduce our emissions we need to:

1. Halt immigration. Every extra resident increases our emissions.
2. Even more, halt migration from the third world. Every person who moves from the third world to the first will increase their emissions , so stopping this movement is very important.

3. Do nothing to increase the standard of living in the third world. Any increase only raises emissions.

4. Put pressure on third world countries to increase education of young girls. This is the best way to reduce birth rates. This can be done by denying them aid, trade, and other assitance until they implement suitable programs.

5. The best way would be to introduce a world-wide one child policy. If the Chinese could do it, so could everyone else.

If we do not take such action we are urinating into the breeze as far as reducing climate change is concerned.

Dear Peter.

Climate change is very real and undeniable. The climate of Earth has always changed, and it always will. According to the historical record locked up in rocks and ice cores, the climate of Earth goes through cycles where it gets cooler and warmer every 1000 years. Every 10,000 years there is an ice age. The last one ended 11,500 years ago. We are overdue for an ice age. Lets hope that burning coal raises temperatures, because when our present warming period ends, our next cooling phase could see mile high glaciers on New York. Don't worry about global warming, Peter. Worry about global cooling.

The only difference between the present warming cycle that we are in right now, and the tens of thousands which proceeded it, is that this one coincided with the industrialization of the human race. This information can be easily accessed by any simple internet search. Look up "CO2 levels and temperature" graphs and even a trendy lefty like your good self could probably figure out that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature, until it CO2 gets to extremely low concentrations, as is present in the atmosphere, right now. And that is because temperature drives CO2 levels, not the other way around.

Of course the kids are moaning about climate change. They have been brainwashed into this nonsense by their politically partisan school teachers, who seem to hate the fact that working class mine workers get higher salaries than they do. And these teachers are part of an increasingly numerous Brahmin caste who think that they know everything, and think that everybody else in society is either stupid, greedy, or both.

They are suffering from hubris, and it shows in every election in the western world, when they just can't understand why the ordinary people that they utterly despise keep voting in nationalist governments everywhere. That is because they live in a safe space bubble where every trendy socialist thought resounds through an echo chamber, and holding certain social values is how they identify each other as fellow Brahmin members.

The last one ended 11,500 years ago. We are overdue for an ice age.
LEGO,
Sounds like GW staved off the overdue ice-age & gave us another Ice-age instead ?

Hi LEGO,

I wonder if teachers teach kids about the Medieval Warming Period, a few hundred years either side of 1100 AD - when wheat was being grown in Greenland and grapes in Scotland ?

Unprecedented global warming' ? How's this: archaeologists in Greenland were trying to excavate graves near the last church but couldn't get through the permafrost.

Sea-levels are currently rising about an inch every decade. Meanwhile, tides rise more than a metre everywhere, twice a day. Do schools teach about tides ?

This year, Adelaide had the record for the hottest capital city temperature ever, half a degree hotter than the previous record in 1939. Very crudely, does that mean that temperatures generally have risen half a degree in eighty years ?

Do schools teach that plants take up CO2 ? And that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more rapidly they take it up - and exhale oxygen. And that if the CO2 concentration drops below 180 parts per million, plants can't take it up at all. If plants can't take up CO2, they die. If plants die, we have no plant food and neither do animals feeding on them, like cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens. So they die. If animals and plants die, we have no food. We die. We need CO2. CO2 is good.

Nuclear energy generation doesn't produce any CO2. Is that what the Greens neo-capitalists want to get into, as the Next Big Thing in investment of their spare cash ?

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth,
Get real, they don't even teach our teachers !

"We still know too little".
So what road do we go down?
Is there evidence of only one cause of AGW and only one road to follow?

A few people on OLO have insight to another cause needing another road.

Dear Loudmouth,

Yuo wrote;

"This year, Adelaide had the record for the hottest capital city temperature ever, half a degree hotter than the previous record in 1939. Very crudely, does that mean that temperatures generally have risen half a degree in eighty years ?"

No it doesn't which you know full well because we have already discussed it. I'm really getting interested in what propels you to write this kind of stuff. Is it a form of willful ignorance? Have you found a clique and you don't want to lose your buddies? Why do you think you do it?

Hi Steele,

I wish I had buddies :( But unfortunately, I have to do my own thinking. So please tell me, how much have average world temperatures gone up over the past, say, fifty years ? Trying to find this sort of information is, for klutzes like me, very difficult. Just give me a figure to work with. A degree per decade over the last fifty years ? Two degrees ?

Otherwise, what can I go on ? Adelaide is such an average sort of place, I'll stick with it unless I get a better offer :)

So what's your take on sea-level rise over the last fifty or a hundred years ? More than an inch a decade ?

Cheers,

Joe

Half a degree hotter than 80 years ago ? Where the temperature gauges that accurate then ?

To Loudmouth.

And prior to that. the temperature went down. And prior to that, the temperature went up. And prior to that, the temperature went down. And prior to that, the temperature went up. And prior to that, the temperature went down.

Earth's climate heats and cools every 1000 years. The present warming trend is right on schedule, and is different from all preceding warming periods only because it coincided with human industrialisation.

Human Induced Global Warming is based upon a reasonable assumption, but it is impossible to measure and therefore entirely unproven. It may be cause for concern but not panic. It may justify continued research, but not the complete destruction of the world economy with the only outcome being that the entire population of the world must return to being rural peasants.