Climate Emergency Rally

These are the photos from the very successful Climate Emergency Rally held in Melbourne yesterday (July 5).

About 4000 people attended the protest, which happened the day after the Final Draft Garnaut Report was released.

This rally was significant for three reasons:
1. It was the first mass rally organised in a clear democratic manner by a broad coalition of groups (over 60 Victorian and interstate groups endorsed the event).
2. It had a clear political focus and fairly radical (although not overly contraversial) demands, inc. *Renewable Energy Not Coal Power
*Public Transport Not New Freeways
and was centred around demanding that the State and Federal Government take real action on climate change now, not in 2-4 years as proposed under the Garnaut Review
3. It was able to draw on the strength of two single issue campaigns that are not about climate change directly, but are projects that in the context of climate change have galvanised large amounts of community opposition. These were the Desalination Plant that the State Labor Government has forked out $140 million for, which will create unnecessary carbon emissions to without really improving the water supply, and the campaign to stop the dredging of the bay in Melbourne. The other issue implicit in the second demand, was the Eddington Review that sought to address the overflow of vehicle and public transport traffic into the city. Its main proposal was to construct a massive underground road tunnel to link up the east and the west.

The collective who organised the rally have already started discussing the possibility of initiating a national Climate Emergency Rally on October 4, one week after the final Garnaut Report will be released. Members of Resistance will be taking this idea to the Climate Camp happening in Newcastle next week.

Check out the media from the day below:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/a-message-drafted-in-red-on-climate-change-20080705-32aa.html
http://news.smh.com.au/national/govts-acting-too-slow-on-climate-change-20080705-323u.html
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23973776-5005961,00.html

Victorian Climate Emergency Rally

Climate change will probably beat us: Garnaut

June 5, AAP

Economist Ross Garnaut thinks humanity will probably lose the fight against climate change.

The architect of Australia's response to climate change says the issue is "too hard" and there is "just a chance" the world will face up to the problem before it's too late.

Professor Garnaut issued the chilling prognosis in a speech in Canberra tonight.

"There is a chance - just a chance - that Australia and the world will manage to develop a position that strikes a good balance between the costs of dangerous climate change and the costs of mitigation," his prepared speech said.

"The consequences of the choice are large enough for it to be worth a large effort to take that chance, in the short period that remains before our options diminish fatefully."

Prof Garnaut was pessimistic about Australia's ability to tackle climate change.

"An observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia could lead one to the view that this issue is too hard for rational policy-making in Australia," he said.

"The issues are too complex, the vested interests surrounding it too numerous and intense, the relevant timeframes too long. Climate change policy remains a diabolical problem."

And Prof Garnaut said the effects of climate change on the planet could outlive human beings.

There was one positive note in his speech - the soaring price of of oil, gas and coal of recent months will see the nation's greenhouse gas emissions fall below the limits set under the Kyoto Protocol.

Higher prices for petrol and electricity will reduce demand and the effects of higher prices will be felt over the next few years, Prof Garnaut said.

"If we had been more or less in line with the Kyoto requirements, we will now be tending below," he said.

Prof Garnaut was delivering the HW Arndt Memorial Lecture at the Australian National University.

He will release a draft report on how the federal government should tackle climate change in July, and a final report in September.

The report is expected to influence the design of an emissions trading scheme, the government's main response to climate change, which will start operating in 2010.

Cyclones and Climate Change - The Deadly Legacy of Oil

Mitchell Anderson, May 9, Desmogblog.com

In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in Burma , the world’s attention is rightly focused on the unfolding human tragedy. This storm is already one of the deadliest cyclones of all time, with up to 100,000 people losing their lives, and another 1.5 million left destitute and homeless.

The incompetence and corruption of the Burmese military regime is exacerbating an already gruesome situation. The impact of the storm was also made worse by the fact that much of the coastline had been denuded of trees, making areas more vulnerable to the deadly storm surge.

But what about the storm itself? Sadly, it seems we can expect many more tragedies like this in the future as human induced climate change proceeds apace.

Nargis was the first named storm of the 2008 North Indian Ocean cyclone season , forming on April 27 in the central Bay of Bengal. Nargis rapidly intensified to attain peak winds of at least 165 km/h (105 mph) on May 2; the Joint Typhoon Warning Center assessed peak winds of 215 km/h (135 mph) - making it a rare category 4 storm.
Sea surface temperatures were over a full degree Celsius above average in the region where Nargis intensified before landfall, as can be seen from this May 1 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite map.

Cyclone Nargis was close to a “perfect storm”. According to Mark Lander , a meteorology professor at the University of Guam. “When we saw the (storm) track, I said, 'Uh oh, this is not going to be good. It would create a big storm surge. It was like Katrina going into New Orleans."
The storm pushed a 12 foot wall of water onto the densely populated Irrawaddy delta in central Myanmar. The result was the worst disaster ever in the impoverished country.

It is impossible to link any single storm to climate change but there is mounting scientific evidence that our warming world will produce more intense storms such as Nargis, with a predicable human toll. Last year, Cyclone Sidr slammed into Bangladesh, killing as many as 10,000 people and leaving 20,000 homeless."While we can never pinpoint one disaster as the result of climate change, there is enough scientific evidence that climate change will lead to intensification of tropical cyclones," said Sunita Narain, director of the Indian environmental group Center for Science and Environment."Nargis is a sign of things to come," she said. "The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims and their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gas emissions."

The science is already there. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had clearly observed that cyclones will increase in their intensity as a result of global warming. According to the IPCC: “There is observational evidence of an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures.”

The IPCC also noted that based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea surface temperatures.

Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in the journal Nature in 2005 that warmer oceans worldwide are making devastating storms such as Hurricane Katrina more likely by making cyclones on average more powerful and longer lasting. He found that the destructive power of tropical cyclones worldwide had increased by 70% in the last 30 years.

Another paper was published in the prestigious journal Science , backing up Emmanuel’s disturbing findings. These researchers found that the number of deadly Category 4 and 5 storms worldwide has almost doubled in the last 35 years.

This is no act of God. The authors of both these papers attributed this disturbing trend at least in part to human-induced climate change.

Imagining cyclones becoming more powerful is like imaging Cher with a more flamboyant wardrobe. Even an average sized hurricane packs 200 times more energy than the electrical generating capacity of the entire planet.

While this cold statistic is hard to imagine, the physical evidence of that massive power sadly is not. As the human tragedy unfolds in Burma, we should remember that these grim disasters are becoming more likely due to our warmer world - and our continued addiction to fossil fuels.