Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts

Wednesday 20 March 2019

Estimated 100,000 attended School Strike For Climate rallies across Australia on 15 March 2019


 
@TheNewDailyAU
@scidocmartin
Unknown




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Monday 11 March 2019

State of Play 11 March 2019: as both Australian federal election and New South Wales state election grow near



A Newspoll survey of 1,610 Australian voted was conducted between Thursday 7 March and Sunday 10 March 2019.

The Federal Liberal-Nationals Coalition Government suffered its 50th consecutive loss on a Two-Party Preferred (TPP) basis since June 2016 in this latest Newspoll.

50th Newpoll results:

Primary Vote – Labor 39 percent (unchanged) to Liberal-Nationals 36 per cent (down 1 point), The Greens 9 per cent, One Nation 7 per cent.

Two Party Preferred (TPP) - Labor 53 per cent (unchanged) to Liberal-Nationals Coalition 46 per cent (down 1point).

Voter Net Satisfaction With Leaders’ Performance – Prime Minister Scott Morrison -2 points and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten -15 points.

If a federal election had been held on 10 March 2019 based of the preference flow in July 2016 then Labor would have won government with a majority 86 seats (up 2 seats since February poll) to the Coalition's 59 seats (down 4 seats since February poll) in the House of Representatives.

On the basis of these predictions voting in the NSW North Coast electorate of Page held by Nationals MP Kevin Hogan may go down to the wire.

Even the sports betting is favouring Labor over the Coalition.

Meanwhile in New South Wales just 12 days out from a the March 2019 state election and  The Guardian is reporting that that:

A new poll indicates Labor leads the coalition 51% to 49% on a two-party preferred basis with Daley ahead of Berejiklian as preferred premier.

The UComms/ReachTel poll, published in the Sun-Herald, also shows the Coalition’s primary vote has dropped to 28.7% while Labor’s remains steady at 34.1%.

While a YouGov Galaxy poll conducted for The Daily Telegraph shows the NSW Nationals are on the cusp of losing Barwon and Lismore and are also facing battles in the National­ seats of Upper Hunter, Tweed, Murray and Coffs Harbour, and Liberal-held Coogee, East Hills, Penrith and Goulburn.

It is being said that the loss of six of those ten seats would result in a post-election Berejiklian Government being a minority government. The last minority NSW government was voted in from 1991-1995. It was a Coalition Government supported by Independents,

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Sunday 23 December 2018

Australia 2018: State of the Climate


Australian Bureau of Meteorology, State of the Climate 2018, December 2018:

“Australia's weather and climate are changing in response to a warming global climate. Australia has warmed just over 1 °C since 1910, with most warming since 1950. This warming has seen an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events and increased the severity of drought conditions during periods of below-average rainfall. Eight of Australia’s top ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2005.

The year-to-year changes in Australia’s climate are mostly associated with natural climate variability such as El Niño and La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean and phases of the Indian Ocean Dipole in the Indian Ocean. This natural variability now occurs on top of the warming trend, which can modify the impact of these natural drivers on the Australian climate.

Increases in temperature are observed across Australia in all seasons with both day and night-time temperatures showing warming. The shift to a warmer climate in Australia is accompanied by more extreme daily heat events. Record-warm monthly and seasonal temperatures have been observed in recent years, made more likely by climate change.”

DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT (PDF 7.16 MB)

Report at a glance

The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO play an important role in monitoring, analysing and communicating observed changes in Australia's climate.
This fifth, biennial State of the Climate report draws on the latest monitoring, science and projection information to describe variability and changes in Australia’s climate. Observations and climate modelling paint a consistent picture of ongoing, long term climate change interacting with underlying natural variability.
These changes affect many Australians, particularly the changes associated with increases in the frequency or intensity of heat events, fire weather and drought. Australia will need to plan for and adapt to some level of climate change. This report is a synthesis of the science informing our understanding of climate in Australia and includes new information about Australia’s climate of the past, present and future. The science underpinning this report will help inform a range of economic, environmental and social decision-making and local vulnerability assessments, by government, industry and communities.

Key points

Australia

·         Australia's climate has warmed just over 1 °C since 1910 leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events.
·         Oceans around Australia have warmed by around 1 °C since 1910, contributing to longer and more frequent marine heatwaves.
·         Sea levels are rising around Australia, increasing the risk of inundation.
·         The oceans around Australia are acidifying (the pH is decreasing).
·         April to October rainfall has decreased in the southwest of Australia. Across the same region May–July rainfall has seen the largest decrease, by around 20 per cent since 1970.
·         There has been a decline of around 11 per cent in April–October rainfall in the southeast of Australia since the late 1990s.
·         Rainfall has increased across parts of northern Australia since the 1970s.
·         Streamflow has decreased across southern Australia. Streamflow has increased in northern Australia where rainfall has increased.
·         There has been a long-term increase in extreme fire weather, and in the length of the fire season, across large parts of Australia.

Global

·         Concentrations of all the major long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase, with carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rising above 400 ppm since 2016 and the CO2 equivalent (CO2-e) of all gases reaching 500 ppm for the first time in at least 800,000 years.
·         Emissions from fossil fuels continue to increase and are the main contributor to the observed growth in atmospheric CO2.
·         The world’s oceans, especially in the southern hemisphere, are taking up more than 90 per cent of the extra energy stored by the planet as a result of enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations.
·         Global sea level has risen by over 20 cm since 1880, and the rate has been accelerating in recent decades.
·         Globally averaged air temperature has warmed by over 1 °C since records began in 1850, and each of the last four decades has been warmer than the previous one.

Future

Australia is projected to experience:
·         Further increases in sea and air temperatures, with more hot days and marine heatwaves, and fewer cool extremes.
·         Further sea level rise and ocean acidification.
·         Decreases in rainfall across southern Australia with more time in drought, but an increase in intense heavy rainfall throughout Australia.

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Wednesday 19 September 2018

State of Play Australia 2018: 11 per cent of the workforce is unemployed and 8 per cent underemployed


Roy Morgan, media release excerpt, 13  September 2018:

Australian employment has grown solidly over the past year however the faster rate of overall growth in the Australian workforce due to more Australians looking for work means unemployment has increased to a two-year high of 11% in August.

The latest data for the Roy Morgan employment series for August shows:

* 11,940,000 Australians were employed in August, up 255,000 over the past year;

* The workforce which comprises employed and unemployed Australians is now 13,416,000, up 407,000 on a year ago;

* 1,476,000 Australians were unemployed (11% of the workforce); an increase of 152,000 (up 0.8%) on a year ago and the highest level of unemployment for over two years since March 2016;

* In addition 1,071,000 Australians (8.0% of the workforce) are now under-employed, working part-time and looking for more work, a fall of 170,000 in a year (down 1.5%);

* The increase in employment was driven by an increase in full-time employment which was up 323,000 to 7,761,000, while part-time employment fell 68,000 to 4,179,000;

* Roy Morgan’s real unemployment figure of 11% for August is more than twice as high as the current ABS estimate for July 2018 of 5.3%.

Source: Roy Morgan Single Source October 2005 – August 2018. Average monthly interviews 4,000.

Full media release can be found here.

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Monday 6 August 2018

'Too Dumb To Know That They Are Dumb': an unexpected explanation of why political extremism in Western democracies is as it is.....


A possible explanation for the continuing presence on the Australian political stage of Pauline Hanson, David  Leyonhjelm, Tim Wilson, Darren Hinch, Ian Macdonald, Barnaby Joyce, Michaelia Cash, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Christian Porter, Julie Bishop, Josh Frydenberg, Greg Hunt, Alan Tudge and Malcolm Turnbull - Rupert Murdoch suffers from the Dunning‐Kruger effect and has infected much of the mainstream media.

Ian G. Anson, Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and the Dunning‐Kruger Effect, April 2018:

A widely cited finding in social psychology holds that individuals with low levels of competence will judge themselves to be higher achieving than they really are. In the present study, I examine how the so‐called “Dunning‐Kruger effect” conditions citizens' perceptions of political knowledgeability. While low performers on a political knowledge task are expected to engage in overconfident self‐placement and self‐assessment when reflecting on their performance, I also expect the increased salience of partisan identities to exacerbate this phenomenon due to the effects of directional motivated reasoning. Survey experimental results confirm the Dunning‐Kruger effect in the realm of political knowledge. They also show that individuals with moderately low political expertise rate themselves as increasingly politically knowledgeable when partisan identities are made salient. This below‐average group is also likely to rely on partisan source cues to evaluate the political knowledge of peers. In a concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary debates about rational ignorance, motivated reasoning, and political polarization.

PsyPost, 16 April 2018:

For his study, Anson examined 2,606 American adults using two online surveys.

He evaluated the knowledge of the participants by quizzing them regarding the number of years served by a senator, the name of the current Secretary of Energy, the party with more conservative positions regarding health care, the political party currently in control of the House of Representatives, and which of four programs the U.S. federal government spends the least on.

Most of the participants performed poorly on the political quiz — and those who performed worse were more likely to overestimate their performance.

“Many Americans appear to be extremely overconfident in their political knowledgeability, because they have no way of knowing how little they actually know about the world of politics (this is the so-called ‘double bind of incompetence’). But there’s a catch: when Republicans and Democrats engage in partisan thought processes, this effect becomes even stronger than before,” Anson explained.

“Partisans with modest factual knowledge about politics become even more convinced that they are savvier than average when they reflect on a world full of members of the opposite party. In fact, when I asked partisans to ‘grade’ political knowledge quizzes filled out by fictional members of the other party, low-skilled respondents gave out scores that reflected party biases much more than actual knowledge.”

“The results seem to indicate the existence of a widespread failure of political discourse in the United States: when a partisan talks to someone of the out-party, they are pretty likely to misjudge the political knowledgeability of themselves and their conversation partner. More often than not, this means that partisans will think of themselves as far more politically knowledgeable than an out-partisan, even when that person is extremely politically knowledgeable,” Anson told PsyPost.

“I think this has major implications for the breakdowns in political discourse we often observe in contemporary American democracy.”

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Friday 3 August 2018

Supermarket giant Coles’ “bagflip’’ did not go down well and the company was stopped in its tracks


This was typical of the response to the Coles Supermarkets Australia Pty Ltd end of July 2018 announcement that is was indefinitely suspending a full ban on the use of free plastic shopping bags in its stores.

The Daily Examiner, 2 August 2018, p.13:

Supermarket giant Coles’ “bagflip’’ in continuing to hand out free reusable plastic bags is a perplexing move.

After spending the past month getting its customers used to the idea there would be no more single-use bags, Coles management has caved in to the tantrums of some customers unable to get their head around the notion of doing something to help the environment or pay up.

Not surprisingly the environmentalists are outraged.

For a start the so-called reusable plastic bags are just a step up from the tissue-thin, single-use bags clogging landfill and choking marine wildlife.

The smart thing about the proposed bag ban was that the supermarket was using a price signal to reinforce the change, a language its bargain-hunting customers were sure to understand.

No longer.

The customer has come first, ahead of the environment, good planning and common sense.

Without a price tag, customers are going to treat the reusable bags just like the old ones, which will add a splash of colour to the litter.

It has the same logic as trying to improve a child’s behaviour by giving in to its demand.

The “child” in this case does spend millions of dollars in your store, but with Woolworths continuing to charge the 15 cents for resuable bags, shoppers didn‘t have many options.

Twitter 1-2 August 2018:


By midday on 2 August 2018 Coles reversed its backflip and set a new deadline for stores - 29 August 2018 is now the deadline for handouts of free reusable plastic shopping bags.

 Hopefully by the beginning of 2019 even reuseable plastic bags will no longer be available for purchase.
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Friday 20 July 2018

Too warm, too dry as Winter draws closer to Spring in Australia 2018


Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), 12 Jly 2018:

Warmer days and nights favoured for August–October

August to October days and nights are likely to be warmer than average for most of the country, with high chances (greater than 80%) in eastern Victoria and NSW, and southern Tasmania.

Days and nights in August are likely to be warmer than average for most of Australia, with high chances (greater than 80%) of warmer days in the southeast.

Historical accuracy for August–October maximum temperatures is moderate for eastern and northern parts of Australia, as well as southern WA. Elsewhere, accuracy is low to very low. Historical accuracy for minimum temperatures is moderate for the northern half of Australia, SA, and Tasmania, but low to very low elsewhere.

Temperature - The chance of above median maximum temperature for August to October



Drier than average August–October likely in northeast and southeast mainland
August to October is likely to be drier than average in Victoria, NSW, southeast SA and northeast Queensland

The August outlook shows most of Victoria, NSW and Queensland are likely to be drier than average.

Historical outlook accuracy for August to October is moderate over most of the country, except for interior WA, where accuracy is low to very low.

Rainfall - Totals that have a 75% chance of occurring for August to October

Drought

June rainfall was below average for most of Australia, and very much below average for parts of the east coast

The start of the southern wet season has been drier than average

Rainfall deficiencies persist in both the east and west of the country, increasing in the east at the 6- and 15-month timescales, and along the west coast at the 15-month timescale

Lower-layer soil moisture was below average for June across most of New South Wales, the southern half of Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory, the Kimberley and the south of Western Australia

Soil Moisture

Soil moisture in the lower layer (from 10 cm to 100 cm deep) for June decreased over eastern Australia, and increased over parts of northwest Western Australia following above average rainfall for June.

Lower-layer soil moisture was below average for the Kimberley and southern Western Australia away from the west coast, most of South Australia and the Northern Territory, New South Wales and eastern Victoria, southern and eastern Queensland south of a line between Birdsville and Townsville, and along the coastal fringe of eastern Cape York Peninsula.

Map of lower level soil moisture for the previous month

NSW Dept. of Primary Industries, NSW State Seasonal Update - June 2018. Click on map to enlarge:



Tweed, Richmond, Kyogle, Lismore, Byron Bay, Ballina, Clarence Valley local government areas, as at 15 July 2018 according to Combined Drought Indicator:


The entire Northern Rivers region is considered drought affected. 
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Wednesday 6 June 2018

Australian climate change denying journalists are at it again


This was @SkyNewsAust, tweeting on 3 June 2018:

.@chriskkenny: Australia’s total carbon emissions is around 550 million tonnes. That is lower than the annual emissions from volcanoes. If our emissions go up or down, it will make precisely no difference to the planet. #kennyonsunday

News Corp journalist, author, former Liberal Party political adviser and Sky News host of "Kenny on Sunday", Chris Kenny is toying with comparisons in an attempt to downplay climate change facts and figures.

According to the Dept. of Environment and Energy Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory annual greenhouse gas emissions for 2017 stood at 531.9 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2-e) by September that year.

That represents a 1.1 per cent increase in Australia’s annual emissions.

While according to U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, human emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and cement production (green line) have risen to more than 35 billion metric tons per year, while volcanoes (purple line) produce less than 1 billion metric tons annually. NOAA Climate.gov graph, based on data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Burton et al., 2013. [my highlighting and emphasis]

Leaving aside the fact that Australia has no active volcanoes so no direct comparison can be made between domestic man-made greenhouse gas emissions and domestic natural volcanic emissions, it is clear that the level of human emissions far exceed volcanic emissions at global levels.

It is also clear that a rise in Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions will have an impact, because carbon emissions are still rising globally and this country's annual increase is factored into that total global increase.

It is precisely that total global greenhouse emission figure which is definitely making a difference to the planet and, according to established climate science, that difference is already causing global warming induced problems world-wide.

No amount of sophistry will change that fact.

This was also  @SkyNewsAust tweeting on 3 June 2018:

.@rowandean: On the first day of the calendar winter we've also had a record breaking cold start to the season despite, only a day earlier, the climate change-loving Bureau reassuring us all how warm it would be.

News Corp journalist, magazine editor, author and Sky News commentator, Rowan Dean, is confused about what the term "record breaking" actually means.

On 1 June - the exact date of the start of calendar winter - in Sydney the lowest temperature was 13°C. The lowest recorded temperature for 1 June was 2.1°C in 1932 and the average minimum for June is 18.6°C. 

In Melbourne on the same day the lowest temperature was 3°C. The lowest June record for Melbourne was previously set at 3.3°C in 1937 and the average minimum for June is 6.9°C. 

Brisbane's lowest temperature on 1 June was 8°C. The lowest recorded June temperature for Brisbane was 5°C in 2001 and the average minimum for June is 10.9°C. 

So yes, it was a cold start to winter. However the cold was no across the board record breaker.

 When it comes to what the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) stated about Winter 2018 - it didn't state every single day would definitely be warm or warmer.

 What it did state on 31 May 2018 was that:

For the winter outlook, issued 31 May 2018, the southeast mainland of Australia is likely to be drier than average.

June has high chances of being drier than average in the southeast mainland, and is also likely to be drier across much of central and western Australia, except the southwest.

Winter days and nights are likely to be warmer than average for most of Australia, except parts of the far north.

Broadscale climate drivers, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole, are forecast to remain neutral during winter and thus have less influence on Australia's climate.

Below average pressure over the Tasman Sea is likely to weaken the westerlies that bring rain to southern Australia. See the Climate Influences section for more information.

 NOTES
*BOM Average weather conditions 12 Australian Towns and cities 
*timeanddate.com at https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/australia for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane temperatures on 1 June 2018
*BOM at http://www.meteorology.com.au/local-climate-history for climate histories of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane
* http://www.eldersweather.com.au/climate.jsp

It doesn't take a genius to see that Sky News Australia (founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1989) appears to be running an anti-science agenda.

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