This comes from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Climate-change denial feels the heat
By Peter Hannam
Scepticism about climate change in Australia may be something else that will melt during the nation's great heatwave.
''There's a powerful climate change signal in extreme weather events in Australia,'' said Joseph Reser, an adjunct professor at Griffith University's school of applied psychology. ''The current heatwave is outside people's experience.''
The article points to a couple of public opinion surveys. The first one in mid 2011 reported that 39 per cent of respondents viewed climate change as ''the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it." In the recent survey fully two thirds said climate change in a problem for us "right now".
Conditions across the country in recent days would provide evidence to support this view. A delayed monsoon over northern Australia has left a string of high-pressure systems to dominate weather patterns over the continent for a fortnight. Temperatures have reached 49 degrees in some areas while the country posted a record average temperature of 40.33 degrees last Monday. Seven of the 20 hottest average maximum days have a 2013 time stamp.
Just 4.2 per cent of the survey's 4347 respondents selected the option ''there is no such thing as climate change'' and 8.5 per cent could be considered strong sceptics, Professor Reser said.
He said a ''remarkable'' finding was 45 per cent of respondents reported direct personal experience of climate change. By contrast, the ratio in the US was about a quarter, he said.
That experience included floods (29 per cent), bushfires (23 per cent) and cyclones (18 per cent).
With the climatic change spawning increasingly extreme weather events with increasing frequency that segment of the population that takes climate change seriously may finally be changing here in the United States. Especially wen we see the staggering destruction and rebuilding costs associated with events like Hurricane Sandy. Events that are outside our range of experience. These anomalous extreme weather events will only multiply geometrically as time goes on, as a new study from the National Climate Assessment points out.
Effects of climate change will be felt more deeply in decades ahead, draft report says
By Juliet Eilperin, Published: January 11
A federal advisory panel released a draft report Friday on how Americans can adapt to a changing climate, a more than 1,000 page tome that also sums up what has become increasingly apparent: The country is hotter than it used to be, rainfall is becoming both more intense and more erratic, and rising seas and storm surges threaten U.S. coasts.
The draft of the third National Climate Assessment warns that with the current rate of global carbon emissions, these impacts will intensify in the coming decades.
Climate Change isn't a problem that stands alone, it is a one part of a series of other alarming developments (like accelerating species loss) that form a very alarming web of a much larger problem:
The general degradation of our environmental quality.
I urge you to take the time to watch this important video (with a hat tip to FinchJ) It may be of the most important things I have watched on this site.
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For much more see FinchJ's outstanding diary:
Introduction to Agroecology: Holistic Management- Cattle, Cause or Cure for Climate Crisis?