Andrew Glikson

Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist.

Andrew's recent articles

ANDREW GLIKSON. The ABC 2018 year-roundup and the defining issue of our time.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil - God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act Dietrich Bonhoeffer The ABC 2018 year wrap-up included a few seconds of David Attenboroughs science-based warning to humanity of an impending global climate catastrophe (https://www.her.ie/news/david-attenborough-appealing-help-defining-issue-time-438220), as well as a few seconds of the California and Queensland fires. Otherwise, the program was dominated by sports events, ABC domestic affairs, politicians personal scandals, the Royals and a sprinkle of global events, mostly given longer time slots.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Crimes against the Earth: a deep time perspective.

Dear Caesar Keep Burning, raping, killing But please, please Spare us your obscene poetry And ugly music (From Seneca's last letter to Nero)

ANDREW GLIKSON. The 2018 Queensland and California firestorms: there is no Planet B.

It takes only a spark, from a lightning or human ignition, to start a fire, but it involves high temperatures, a period of drought, a build-up of dry vegetation and strong winds to start a bush fire, such as is devastating Queensland and recently California. When all these factors combine firestorms ensue, enhanced by strong winds from the hot interior of the continent, overwhelming the desiccated bush and human habitats. This is the face of global warming, which on the continents has reached an average of 1.5oC (http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/)

ANDREW GLIKSON. Climate cover-up and Orwellian newspeak.

In so far as it may have been assumed that the growing manifestations of global warming through extreme weather events will cause people to realize the reality and the implications of carbon emissions, this is only partly happening, due to ongoing attempts by large part of the mainstream media to attribute these events to natural causes., masking the existential threat posed by global climate disruption.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Which planet is the media living on?

While extreme weather events are being reported almost daily on news bulletins, only rarely is it conveyed that these events constitute the manifestation of advanced global warming and a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere. Rarely do major ABC TV forums, such as The Drum, The Insiders, Q and A, Four-Corners, the 7.30 Report, Breakfast, Matter of Fact and other programs include climate scientists to discuss the trends and consequences of climate disruption, mitigation and adaptation. In a recent interview with the ex-PM on the ABC Q&A program, the climate has hardly been mentioned. Given his statement (on...

ANDREW GLIKSON. High sea level rise and the IPCC.

In a key paper titled Scientific reticence and sea level rise (https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha01210n.html) (2007) James Hansen, the renowned climate scientist, is critical of what he regards as major underestimates of the magnitude and pace of global warming, as further elaborated in the article How the IPCC Underestimated Climate Change: Here are just eight examples of where the IPCC missed predictions) (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-ipcc-underestimated-climate-change/) (Glen Scherer, 2012). It is only more recently that the IPCC has upgraded its climate projections, stating Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8C to 1.2C....

The road to 2oC and beyond: IPCC warnings of extreme global warming.

Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that global temperature rise of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures would constitute a threshold the planet cannot cross without suffering the worst effects of climate change. Yet according to the U.N. report, mean global land-sea temperatures have already risen above 1C and the planet could pass the 1.5C threshold as early as 2030 if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current level and no effective CO2 down-draw measures takes place. These projections underestimate what is happening in the atmosphere-ocean-land system since, due to amplifying feedbacks from desiccating land, warming oceans, melting...

ANDREW GLIKSON. Climate projections.A world on borrowed time.

Current temperature trajectories are on par with or exceed the IPCCs dangerous projections (Figure 1). Acting as the lungs of the biosphere, over tens of millions of years the atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich carbon-low composition, allowing the flourishing of mammals. The anthropogenic release to the atmosphere to date of more than 600 Gigaton of carbon (GtC) is reversing this trend, threatening to return the Earth to conditions which preceded the emergence of modern life forms, including humans.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Human cognitive dissonance and the mass extinction of species.

The history of Earth is marked by at least seven major mass extinctions, including asteroid impact effects 580 million years ago, the end Ordovician glaciation, late Devonian asteroid impacts, end-Permian volcanism and ocean anoxia, end-Jurassic volcanism and Cretaceous-Tertiary asteroid impactmostly associated with an extreme rise in atmospheric CO2. Currently the seventh mass extinction of species is taking place, mainly as a consequence of CO2 rise at a rate close to that induced by an asteroid impact (Figure 1). The Seventh mass extinction is triggered by a species which harnessed transfer of carbon from the Earths crust to the atmosphere and...

ANDREW GLIKSON. Last call on climateevidence for a demise of the planetary life support system.

In a key paper titled Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Science (6.8.2018), a group of 17 climate and environment scientists (Will Steffen, Johan Rockstrm, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber) have issued a stern warning to humanity with regard to the future of advanced life on Earth (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115)

ANDREW GLIKSON. Global fires and droughts while Nero fiddles (but don't mention the words 'climate change').

There was a time when the contamination of drinking water constituted a punishable crime. Nowadays those who wilfully ignore or promote the destruction of the Earths atmosphere and ocean acidification through the rise in emission of carbon gases (2014 ~36.08 billion ton CO2/year ; 2017 ~36.79 billion ton CO2/year), hold major sway in the world. Consequently the rise rate of atmospheric CO2 at 2 ppm/year (from 408.84 ppm in June 2014 to 410.79 ppm in June 2018) is the fastest observed in the geological record since 66 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs....

ANDREW GLIKSON. A mainstream media drive towards a nuclear WWIII ?

For many weeks much of the mainstream media world-wide, including broadcasters, been warning of potential concessions in the negotiations between the US and North Korea and between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, lest vital interests of the west are compromised. In the process little has been said about the alternative for such negotiations and potential agreements, namely a nuclear holocaust on a regional to a global scale, with consequences that belong to the unthinkable (https://thebulletin.org/2010/03/the-climatic-consequences-of-nuclear-war/ ; https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2017/08/12/even-a-small-nuclear-war-would-still-have-effects-on-global-scale/#5fbd4b75507d; http://www.nucleardarkness.org/warconsequences/hundredfiftytonessmoke/). In this context, a picture is emerging regarding the priorities of the US President: On the one hand favoring authoritarian undemocratic leaders...

ANDREW GLIKSON. On the flooded Thai cave and the Hiroshima deluge

The heroic rescue of 13 young people from the flooded Chiang Mai cave in Thailand represents everything which is wonderful about humans cooperating and helping each other, and where they are at their best. By stark contrast the cover-up by the authorities and the media of the underlying reasons for the unfolding tragedy of the Hiroshima deluge, in which to-date more than 200 people have died or are missing, tells of an indifference vis-a-vis the advancing spate world-wide of extreme weather events, related to global warming. Not that every single storm, flood or fire can be attributed to climate change,...

ANDREW GLIKSON. Abbotts views on climate change

Since 2015 when the then Prime Minister stated Australia was making a definite commitment to a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and possibly as high as 28% reduction, now Abbott states he did not foresee as prime minister how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments.

ANDREW GLIKSON. The rise of fascism on the sinking Titanic.

In her new book Fascism: A Warning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I27X9L8rReo), Madeleine Albrights states that the Fascism of a century ago was not atypical: In hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss every Fascist of this era as a thoroughly bad guy or a lunatic, but that is too easy, also dangerous, she writes. Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of it. Anti-democratic leaders are winning democratic elections and some of the worlds savviest politicians are moving closer to tyranny with each passing year. Inherent in fascism are extreme nationalism, totalitarianism, racism, militarism a push for war, all of...

ANDREW GLIKSON. Silence over the acceleration of global warming.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice (Martin Luther King) If there is a single critical issue science has ever conveyed, it is that altering the composition of the Earths atmosphere can only bear fatal consequences for nature and humanity. It is estimated that, to date, some 150,000 to 400,000 people world-wide have perished each year due to the direct and indirect effects of global warming (https://newrepublic.com/article/121032/map-climate-change-kills-more-people-worldwide-terrorism; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-and-health/), including for example 1833 in New Orleans, possibly 5000 in Porto Rico, 6329 by typhoon Haiyan in the Philippine. The list goes on. While these events have been documented in...

ANDREW GLIKSON. An Orwellian climate endangers planet

Two plus two is five if the party says so (George Orwell). Should anyone record the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, they may report that, while temperatures and sea levels were rising, the human sense of reality has been clouded by electronic systems, including television, the internet and smartphones, by science fiction, virtual realities, public circuses, fake news, gratuitous hype and superlatives which overtook common sense and the quest for protection of the earth and the survival of the species.

Methane, coal seam gas and the demise of the planetary life support system

The extraction and transfer from the earth crust to the atmosphere of every economically available molecule of carbon, including coal, oil, tar sand oil, shale oil, methane gas, coal seam gas and other forms of hydrocarbon, constitutes the most significant shift in composition of the atmosphere since the PETM hyperthermal event about 56 million years ago and the K-T extinction of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Daniel Ellsberg and the global nuclear suicide machine

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save human way of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes. Albert Einstein 1946 Daniel Ellsberg, former presidential advisor, who had released the famous top-secret Pentagon Papers related to the Viet Nam war, also possessed a cache of top secret documents related to America's nuclear program in the 1960s. In this new book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (5/12/2017) he reveals the contents of those documents, with their shocking relevance for today. It is an insiders account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the...

ANDREW GLIKSON. The betrayal of the future

A species which has invented combustion, electromagnetic radiation and nuclear energy orders of magnitude more powerful than its own physical potential, needs to be perfectly wise and in control lest it is overwhelmed by these powers.

ANDREW GLIKSON. The onset of climate tipping points

As extreme temperatures, sea ice melt rates, collapse of Greenland glaciers, thawing of Siberian and Canadian permafrost, increased evaporation in the Arctic and intrusion of cold fronts into Europe and North America are rising, analogies with geological hyperthermal methane-release events such as the 56 m.y. old Paleocene-Eocene boundary thermal maximum and mass extinction (PETM), and even with the 251 Ma-old Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary and mass extinctions, are becoming more likely.

ANDREW GLIKSON. The ABC and the climate impasse.

Half-truth is much worse than a whole lie because it makes it even harder to tell the difference between the two. (Gene Ruyle) For many weeks the Australian parliament, paralyzed by the antiquated legalistic of Section 44 and pre-occupied with the marriage equality issue and the hounding of top politicians, remained oblivious to the existential risks to life on Earth, expressed by extreme weather events including powerful cyclones and extensive wildfires, engulfing large parts of the globe, and to the rising threat of nuclear annihilation. Nor does the majority of the Fourth Estate appear to be too concerned, preoccupied...

ANDREW GLIKSON. The price of the Earth.

Dear Caesar, Keep burning, raping and killing, but please, please spare us your obscene poetry and ugly music (From Seneca's last letter to Nero). Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin came up with a figure of 3000 trillion for the worth of planet Earth, given its breathable atmospherea shield from cosmic radiation. A close estimate is by Greg Laughlin at US$5000 trillion. By contrast Mars is estimated as a modest $16,000 while Venus is dismissed at about a penny (https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/new-formula-values-earth-at -50000000000000.html). Far from a joke, such estimates symbolize the religious worship of money, the loss of reverence toward nature and life and...

Nuclear portents mount while Rome burns

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. (Albert Einstein May 1946).

ANDREW GLIKSON. 2.0 minutes to midnight on the clock of the atomic scientists.

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences (Winston Churchill). On 25 January 2018 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the arms of its doomsday clock to 2.0 minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since 1953, with implications for humanity and nature. This is the closest the clock has been to catastrophe since detonation of the first hydrogen bomb on 1 November 1952 on Eniwatok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. By 2 March 2016 some 14,900...

ANDREW GLIKSON. An Orwellian climate: the rise of dangerous ideologies in a heating world.

It is impossible to say anything good about Ingsoc George Orwells brutal and inhumane 1984 dystopia, mimicking Hitlers and Stalins regimes, with only one proviso: Bar blowing atomic bombs in distant wars, no mention is made in the book of a systematic devastation of the planetary environmentsomething modern global civilization is in the process of wilfully committing through large-scale carbon emission and hair-trigger nuclear fleets. The parallel rise of extreme ideologies around the world, denying the existential threat to nature and habitats, is closely relevant.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Climate change, droughts and wars: is there a nexus?

According to Al Gore during 2006 and 2010 some 60 percent of farms in Syria were destroyed and abandoned and some 80 percent of the livestock were killed during the most severe drought parts of the Middle East ever recorded[i]. Subsequently more than a million Syrians migrated into cities, along with refugees from the Iraq War, setting the stage for a civil war. Beginning with the Arab Spring demonstrations in Syria in January 2011 and a brutal crackdown by the regime, the conflict escalated since July 2011, killing over 450,000 and displacing more than 12 million Syrians[ii]. More than 4.8...

ANDREW GLIKSON. The ALP and global warming

When a lump of coal was presented in Parliament to the cheers of conservative MPs no doubts could remain regarding their position on global warming, covered with the thin fig leaf of the Paris agreement. One wonders whether the PM would now be willing to repeat his statement of 2010: Now our response to climate change must be guided by science. The science tells us that we have already exceeded the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon dioxide. We are as humans conducting a massive science experiment with this planet. Its the only planet weve got.

ANDREW GLIKSON. The criminal dimension of climate change-a new book.

We're simply talking about the very life support system of this planet. (Professor Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impacts) The extreme rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since the onset of the industrial age, reaching approximately 403 parts per million in 2017, and the corresponding rise in mean global temperature to +1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperature, pose an existential risk for the future of civilization and nature.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Parliament and the media cover up the looming climate crisis

Sometimes it is what is not mentioned, or little-mentioned, rather than widely discussed, which tells the story.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Humanitys stark choice: continue genocidal wars or try to save our planetary home.

CO2 levels reached 403.64 ppm in October 2017, a rise of 2.07 ppm above October 2016. This has triggered amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans. It is becoming clear the only way to avert environmental and nuclear catastrophes is to down-draw atmospheric CO2 using budgets on a scale currently only available to the military.

ANDREW GLIKSON. at 2.5 minutes to midnight, we must defend the planet

On the 27 January, 2017, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the arms of its doomsday clock to 2.5 min to midnight, the closest it has been since 1953, with enormous implications for humanity and nature. A book titled The Plutocene: Blueprints for a post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth elaborates the reasons for the decision of the Atomic Scientists.

ANDREW GLIKSON. A privileged few ignore scorched Earth in race to Mars

Scientific exploration of the solar system planets constitutes one of the most exciting achievements of the human race. However, the idea of colonizing Mars may prove to be one of the most misleading, creating an impression that an alternative exists to planet Earth, which is a unique haven of life in the solar system, perhaps even in the Milky Way, and which is currently suffering from dangerous heating, rising oceans, extreme weather events, mass extinction of species and a growing risk of a nuclear calamity.

ANDREW GLIKSON. Hurricanes and megafires abound, but dont mention the words climate change

As extreme hurricanes and extensive wildfires proliferate around the globe, an internet search suggests that, in reporting these events, the words climate change have almost disappeared from much of the mainstream media. Some exceptions include the SMH[1] and the Guardian[2]. Nor have numerous ABC reports of the Houston floods included references to climate change. See for example at the following links[3]

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