Australian Conservation Foundation Media Release
With 2024 now officially declared the hottest year on record, and wildfires continuing to rage in California, the Australian Conservation Foundation says urgent action is needed to phase out fossil fuels globally.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed on Friday, previous projections that 2024 was the warmest on record globally and the first year the average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
“This is what 1.5°C of global warming looks like,” Annika Reynolds (they/them), ACF’s national climate policy advisor said.
“Australia’s Black Summer, the severe wildfires in 2021 and 2022 across Europe, and now LA’s horrific fires in the middle of winter. Climate change is driving a cascading series of unnatural disasters all around the globe.”
“Australia is fuelling this crisis with its reckless fossil fuel exports and approvals. In 2024, Climate Analytics found that Australia was the second largest exporter of climate pollution in the world.”
“These complex, compounding and devastating climate disasters will only become more frequent and severe across the world unless we phase out the burning and export of fossil fuels.
“LA’s fires have started during an abnormally dry winter, just as our own Black Summer fires did five years ago, in what went on to become Australia’s most catastrophic fire season. The similarity between smoke-enveloped downtown LA right now, and east coast cities across Australia five years ago, is an alarming reminder for those that lived through the Black Summer.”
“This is all a terrifying glimpse of what could be the new normal if warming continues and 1.5°C becomes new annual average temperature. But it is not yet too late, and the climate science is clear that there are narrow but remaining pathways to stay below the 1.5°C warming ceiling. We must cut emissions further and faster this decade, to avert spiralling climate change.”
“The Albanese Government is getting on with the job of phasing out fossil fuel burning in Australia, by rolling out cleaner, cheaper renewables. But until Albanese stops approving new coal and gas export projects, the legacy of this government – like all Australian governments to date – will be as contributors to the climate crisis.”
On Friday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese drew a link between LA’s most devastating fires on record and climate change but ACF says the PM’s words are not enough, and that now is the time for strong climate action that matches the scale of this crisis.
See also:
Los Angeles fire a wake up call for Australia
Duty of Care on climate pollution
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Friday morning coffee with mates has become a bit of a ritual.
So yesterday one started out with ‘Climate change is bullshit’. He claimed it was hotter when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
To be fair, it was a warm summer day, the max reached 27 degrees in Perth, and where we were outside a beachside cafe with a gentle south westerly, it was probably about 25 degrees. So far this summer Perth has seen only one 40 degree day, and living by the beach, it was no where near that where we were.
I have tried to explain the difference between weather and climate, I have shown graphs of climate data…. but he remains unmoved. Climate change is a hoax.
What will it take for people to acknowledge the truth when it stares them in the face?
Actor Jamie Lee Curtis donated US$1million to charities in fire stressed LA and commented that Pacific Palisades was looking like war torn Gaza – she was immediately condemned by Israel for drawing that comparison.
No sure if the IDF are saying that Gaza is worse or not as bad – at least humanitarian aid is getting through to those in need in LA, not so much in Gaza !
The comparison between Gaza and LA is obscene.
People being evacuated form the fire zone are housed in refugee shelters, are ebing fed, are being provided life’s necessities/
The fires in LA are a natural disaster.
The plight of the population in Gaza is the direct result of war. aid is being withheld while anywhere one could safely lay down to rest is bombed to smithereens. The heartlessness , the callous actions of the IDF of calling for people to move to a safe place and then bomb that ‘safe place’ is a human actions, people are making those decisions. The fires sweeping through the canyons of suburban LA swept, powered by winds up to 100kph are not driven by people who want to wipe out a population.
The difference is so great there can be no comparison.
Even the suboptimal BBC has been motivated by LA fires to publish much climate science information, while Guardian* avoids or barely mentions the obvious; guess RW MSM nada?
*The US version of the Guardian over a decade ago had the Rockefeller Foundation (then Exxon/Chevron) sponsoring their Environmental page, to platform Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich who at ZPG Zero Population Growth was a colleague of dec white nationalist & white Australia admirer John ‘passive eugenics Tanton (muse of Steve ‘great replacement’ Bannon), informs FoxNews etc..
A long game of fossil fueled greenwashing strategy of bigotry blaming post white Australia immigrants and population growth as resonsible for environmental hygiene, but not carbon induced global warming.
Regulatory capture of both parties and in cahoots with agitprop of the RW MSM cartel and ecosystem to wedge and preclude any whiff of change and progress; too easily, with dominant ageing electorates, selfish and distracted voters…
Huh, After a couple of modern centuries of killing, obliteration and subjugation, I’m so dumbfounded and infuriated by the incessant peddling of superstitious bunkum and worn arcane prophecies. And the lazy folk that reject science because its peer reviewed findings and projections do not sit well with their moral conformity founded on pre-science ‘religious’ deceptions and the associated grafting opportunists. That it continues today (massively in the great hegemon, USA), and is now peaking as a political and commercial m.o. across much of the globe (particularly the ‘West’), is a testament to stupidity.
For those aforementioned lazy, complacent, opportunistic morally complicit, try this …. “The meek shall inherit the Earth”, bullshit, the greedy are scouring it to oblivion. Such is the supremacist lead cringing death cult we are forced to endure.