Veterinarian Gundi Rhoades lives in Inverell, NSW, Australia

From an Article by Gundi Rhoades, Sydney Morning Herald, December 26, 2019

Bulls cannot breed at Inverell. They are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating. Mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting.

My work as a veterinarian has changed so much. While I would normally test bulls for fertility, or herds of cattle for pregnancy, I no longer do, because the livestock has been sold. A client’s stud stock in Inverell has reduced from 2000 breeders to zero.

I once assisted farmers who have spent their lives developing breeding programs, with historic bloodlines that go back 80 years. These stud farmers are now left with a handful of breeders that they can’t bear to part with, spending thousands keeping them fed, and going broke doing it.

Cattle that sold for thousands are now in the sale yards at $70 a head. Those classed as too skinny for sale are costing the farmer $130 to be destroyed. They are all gone and it was all for nothing. The paddocks are bare, the dams dry, the grass crispy and brown. The whole region has been completely destocked and is devoid of life.

For 22 years, I have been the vet in this once-thriving town in northern NSW, which, as climate change continues to fuel extreme heat, drought and bushfires, has become hell on Earth.

Here, we are seeing extreme weather events like never before. The other day we had about eight centimetres of rain in 20 minutes. These downpours are like rain bombs. They are so ferocious that a farmer lost all of his fences, and all it did was silt up the dam so he had to use a machine to excavate the mud.

Most farmers in my district have not a blade of grass remaining on their properties. Topsoil has been blown away by the terrible, strong winds this spring and summer. We have experienced the hottest days that I can remember, and right now I can’t even open any windows because my eyes sting and lungs hurt from bushfire smoke.

For days, I have watched as the bushland around us went up like a tinderbox. I just waited for the next day when my clinic would be flooded with evacuated dogs, cats, goats and horses in desperate need of water and food.

The impact of the drought on wildlife is devastating to watch, too. Members of the public are bringing us koalas, sugar gliders, possums, galahs, cockatoos and kangaroos on a daily basis.

The koalas affect me the most. To see these gorgeous, iconic animals dying from thirst is too hard to bear. We save some, but we lose just as many.

The whole town is devastated. My business has halved. But with no horses to breed, no cattle to test and care for, what am I going to do? I have worked day and night to build a future for my family, but who would want to buy our property out here? Who would want to buy a vet clinic in a town where there are no animals to treat because it’s too hot and dry? Where the cattle become infertile from the 40-degree heat. All this on black, baked ground.

I am 53 years old. Can I start again?

Climate change for us is every day, and I am not suffering on the same level as my friends, my clients and the helpless animals I treat. As a veterinarian I am becoming more and more distressed, not just about the state of my town, but the whole world.

Bushfire smoke moves over Inverell.

Personally, I have had weeks when I just cry. It just bloody hurts me. I also have times when I get really angry and I start to swear, which I have never done in my life.

I also have times when I think about the potential this country has to create a renewable future with clean, green energy, and end our reliance on fossil fuels.

You only have to look at how resilient our farmers are in the face of devastating, extreme weather conditions to understand that we can make a powerful, meaningful difference to our future.

The government has no idea what it’s like for us. It has no empathy. Its members don’t know how much it hurts when they just say yes to another coal mine.

I would invite Scott Morrison (Prime Minister) to come and see what life in Inverell is like. In case he chooses not to, I’ll paint this picture for the country and hope people can start to realise and understand the devastating impact climate change is having. I hope they will take a stand for the people, the places and the animals whose voices are too small for him to hear.

>>> Gundi Rhoades is a veterinarian, scientist, mother, beef cattle farmer and member of Veterinarians for Climate Action.

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See also: ‘The Darling River will die’: Scientists say mass fish kill due to over-extraction and drought | The Guardian, February 18, 2019

The quality of life for future generations is in OUR HANDS

From the Editorial Board, Washington Post, August 19, 2019

GLOBAL WARMING is already here, striking substantial regions of the United States with increasing severity. That is the upshot of an exhaustive Post investigation in which Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens analyzed decades of local temperature records and identified a variety of hot spots where warming has proceeded more quickly.

“A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark,” The Washington Post has found. An increase of 2 degrees Celsius — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — is a temperature threshold that scientists warn the world, on average, should not surpass. “Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark.”

Surpassing 2 degrees locally means different things in different places. If the average world temperature were to breach the 2-degree threshold, that would mean some places would have warmed far more than 2 degrees, bringing massive changes, and some places less. But in many of the regions The Washington Post examined, substantial negative effects were clear. Global warming’s consequences are various, pervasive and not always obvious when people consider how their lives will be directly affected — until they are.

The lobster catch around Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay is down 75 percent because of warmer waters. Toxic algae blooms are making a New Jersey lake off-limits to swimmers and boaters. The lake does not freeze like it used to, deterring ice fishermen. Spurred by warmer temperatures, southern pine beetles are invading northern forests. The restless ocean is washing beach homes out to sea. People who now find that their homes and businesses are far closer to the shore than when they bought them are moving them farther back — but fear they will have to move again.

Scientists offer various reasons for the temperature hot spots that have emerged across the United States. Alaska’s breakneck heating aligns with their prediction that human greenhouse-gas-driven warming strikes higher latitudes particularly hard. In the Northeast, a shifting Gulf Stream — a massive flow of water that runs from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Atlantic coast of the United States and then toward Europe, its path influenced by melting Arctic ice — seems to explain some of the temperature anomalies.

The underlying cause, though, is human-caused global warming.

The warming will continue. Humanity has steadily shifted the chemistry of the atmosphere, in ways that could not be reversed quickly even if rational policy were being implemented. The carbon dioxide that emerges from smokestacks and tailpipes lingers in the air for decades. All the more reason to change behavior now. Yet, whether for political advantage or out of sheer pigheadedness or both, President Trump continues to deny and ignore reality. It is beyond unforgivable.

NOTE: It is hard for people to accept global warming when they live in places that are heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer. Particularly when they make money from burning carbon compounds or use huge amounts of energy generated by burning carbon. If you work out of doors, and particularly if you observe the growth of plants, its rather obvious. If you read about whats going on in other parts of the world it is obvious. Where I live, people had ice houses, filled with ice taken from streams over a century ago. Now streams hardly freeze over. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

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See also: Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It’s unforgivable | Tim Winton | Environment | The Guardian, April 20, 2019

New York Times OP-ED: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

By RICHARD A. MULLER,  July 28, 2012.

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.”

Global Warming is a Fact

A recent editorial in the Charleston Gazette points out that there are still many decision makers that doubt the relationship between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the warming of the earth. “What’s next?  No science of any sort allowed in public schools?”

Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, has written that reputable biologists agree that evolution is a bedrock fact of biology — just as all reputable climatologists agree that global warming is real. The Los Angeles Times has said that the doubting scientists are “fossil-fuel-industry-funded ‘experts’ who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines.”

Study: Global Warming is Real

“Global warming is real,” a team of scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have reported. Since the 1950s, the earth has warmed about 1° C. Richard Muller and a team of colleagues, including Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Prize winner in physics, started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study to review and assess the accuracy of existing land temperature data. The team looked at temperature data from 15 previous studies—amounting to some 1.6 billion combined records dating back to 1800—on the subject. 

Muller says that concerns raised by global warming skeptics were specifically addressed, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and data selection bias. The group’s results aligned closely with previous studies’ findings, including ones carried out by groups such as NASA, the Hadley Center, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously,” Muller said in a statement. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”

This year is very unusual for natural disasters, with economic losses of $265 billion, by the end of June, which exceeds that for 2005. Given that the Earth has already warmed 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees F) so far, a goal to keep the temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) has been advocated.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), heat-trapping emissions from the world’s energy sector will lead to a 2-degree Celsius increase in the Earth’s temperature that, as growth continues, will increase to 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees F) by 2100.

“Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,” said Fatih Birol the Chief Economist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Birol spoke in unusually blunt terms about the climate implications of the global energy mix, implications that are disputed by many conservatives in the United States who don’t believe in the connection between human activity and climate change.

David Burwell, who directs the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment, said Birol’s comments have “big implications for capital investment in energy,” though he noted that it will be oil executives and others in the private sector who will drive many of the key decisions.

“We can try to regulate, we can try to incentivize, but ultimately, they’ve got to make the decisions, they’ve got to make the investments,” Birol said, adding that government officials should engage with the energy industry on this topic. “Now’s the time to have the conversation about investments.”  Birol said he believes his agency’s analysis is having an impact in places such as China, which he said would outpace the European Union in per capita carbon emissions by 2015. He added that by 2035, China would outrank the industrialized world as the single biggest overall emitter of greenhouse gases in history.

According to this report, “The U.N. talks, meanwhile, suffered a setback as Canada announced  that it would not agree to sign up to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 climate pact that set emissions targets for all major industrialized nations. Canada had pledged to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions 6 percent by 2012 compared with 1990 levels; as of 2009, its carbon output was 29.8 percent above 1990 levels.”

The continued usage of fossil fuels, including the Marcellus shale gas now being developed, adds significantly to the total burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  If some coal is replaced, that could slow the increase somewhat but that will not be enough in and of itself.  See the earlier report for some of the details, including the research and comments of Dr. James Hansen, the U.S. expert on global climate change.