Category: Columns

Geoff has written for publications as diverse as PC User and The Northern Star His weekly columns have been a source of humour and inspiration for tens of thousands of readers and his mailbox is always full.
Here you can find his more recent contributions.

Union warned of derailment in 2011

Alarm bells rang in the Cage when a derailment occurred on the Melbourne Sydney track on February 24^th 2020 due to “mud holes” on the track. The Rail Tram and Bus Union reported in 2011 that the practice of replacing sleepers without lifting the track, known as sideways replacement, was causing mudholes that could lead to derailment. As a result, then transport minister, Anthony Albanese initiated a study by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau that decided in 2013 the train line was only safe if trains were slowed down and appropriate warnings given.

Last month’s derailment was caused when a train driver travelled at 100kmh through a section of track designated to be safe at speeds of 10kmh apparently unaware of the warning.

The sleepers are inserted without raising the tracks

The 2013 ATSB report concluded:

“the ATSB is satisfied that the necessary steps have been taken to address any issues that might otherwise compromise the safety of rail operations … at the expense of operational efficiencies through increased train running times.”

Industry observers at the time, predicted disaster but, as the official report stopped short of recommending that anything be done about it, everyone, including the national news services packed up and went home until the deaths this week.

The facts are that the Australian Rail Track Company put out a request for tender in 2007 to upgrade the Melbourne to Sydney rail line. The problem was that the old wooden sleepers allowed the guage of the tracks to wander. New concrete sleepers wouild ensure the tracks ran straight and true. That tender was awarded to a consortium using Harry Bilt’s Platypus technology capable of replacing the sleepers without ripping up the rails. According to the ATSB in 2013, the decision to use this controversial technology was that there was not enough money available to do the job properly.

“It is also likely that the cost associated with addressing the ballast, drainage or formation issues would have precluded completely re-sleepering the Melbourne to Sydney line with the funding available and therefore some residual safety risk associated with poor track gauge would have remained if this path had been chosen.”

The dangers of sideways sleeper replacement have long been a topic for discussion on railway discussion boards such as railpage.com.au, unions such as the Victorian Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RBTU) and international forums. The looseness of the ballast put under the sleeper when it is inserted between the rail and the ground allows water to collect and mud-holes to form. The result is known as “fouled ballast.” These concerns were raised on Radio National when the Australian Transport Safety Board reported in 2013.

The gaps under the rails collect water, leading to mud-holes

The ATSB report suggested both short term and long term risk management processes would need to be employed to avoid a major incident. It spent some time outlining speed restrictions and additional monitoring of track failure as the short term measures but was deliberately vague about the methods of avoiding the risks in the long term.

“Longer term strategies ARTC implemented … are unlikely to correct the more deep-seated formation problems. … It is possible that water will continue to weaken the structure in some locations, with a corresponding requirement for an increased regime of track maintenance and the application of new or further speed restrictions.”

The final conclusion, that as long as we run the trains very slowly, we should be able to avoid deaths, is hardly a strategy for creating a safe, high speed rail network. Unfotunately, the problems of fouled ballast are not the only failure to maintain the national rail network during decades of cost-cutting. Analysis of the Wallan derailment also reveals issues with signals and possibly internal processes.

The question now is whether the unfortunate deaths of innocent workers and injury to passengers will inject enough steel into future inquiries to ensure that the national rail network is at least made safe and, ideally, brought up to something resembling international standards. 10km per hour is not an acceptable speed for the major passenger link between Australia’s two largest capital cities.

29 February, 2020
EcoRadio discusses deGrowth

Geoff Ebbs hosted EcoRadio on 4ZZZ yesterday, 26th Feb and took the opportunity to discuss the Circular Economy and an end to growth.

https://soundcloud.com/cage-live/ecoradio-26022020

One of the items he put to air was an interview he had earlier recorded with Dick Smith. “… we know that we cannot continue to grow on a finite planet, but capitalism depends on growth, so it might all go bust. We might not be here to see the future, I’m sure some cockroach will be here and ready to start evolving again, but I am optimistic. I am a capitalist and I hope that some wonderful genius will come along and save us from ourselves.”

Dick Smith campaigned against endless growth

Yes Dick reflects the dilemma we face as a civilisation. Interestingly, he knows more than most of us about the challenges of ending growth. He ran Australian Geographic as a xero-growth company for eight years. Listen to the last three minutes of the interview to hear him discuss that.

27 February, 2020
Throttle raises road cliches to high Art

Familiar road tropes establish spine-tingling chills when you are directly immersed in the experience

There is nothing like a road trip to highlight personality traits and set the scene for a battle between the small domestic world established in the car interior and the big bad world outside the windows of that private space.

So, a white Volvo and a domestic spat and a potentially loving resolution in a dark and lonely rural setting provides the perfect seed for a road drama.

In a brilliant piece of self reflective immersive theatre, digital art outfit The Farm, invites audiences to attend the drama in their own cars, circled around the paddock with their FM radio and headlights as an integral part of the theatre experience.

The scene is set as soon as you turn up, and the experience builds gradually as you queue in your cars, test the radio connection, are reminded of your relationship with the car and are instructed in the etiquette of this post-modern drive in theatre.

When the play begins, you have actually been transported into the lonely, rural, roadside night where the drama takes place. The couple in the car in front of you reflect the (mostly) couples in the car that form the audience.

That the drama involves a series of familiar, even cliched road centred scenarios only strengthens the trope that you are in the play, that the play is exactly what you expect to see, in the same way that the familiar components of the horror thriller, provide comfort and fear at the same time.

So, the play takes our couple through the dramas of a lone attacker, a pedestrian accident, a gang of motorcycle riders and a zombie apocalypse. As the action expands out from the paddock that is the stage into the circle of cars that is the audience, the suspension of disbelief into which we all surrendered early in the process immerses you thoroughly into the action. I sweated with fear, my skin crawled in anticipation at the same time as I laughed at the neighbouring theatre goers giggling hysterically in their vehicle.

As well as the rich conceptual layering of the play itself, the physical acting borders on the incredible. Actors emulating accident victims float and jerk unrealistically in your headlights, slight young women bundle giant zombies into the Volvo boot, one actors walks another along the doors of the car so they fall in through an open window, this is magic rendered in a paddock with a minimum of sets.

This is fully realised modern theatre in the making. It combines digital technology, immersive experience, physical theatre and layered cultural awareness.

The play is Throttle, the venue is the Mudgeeraba Showgrounds, the production company is The Farm and tickets are available through Bleach, the Gold Coast Arts Festival. The play is sold out, so you will not get the chance to see it this time round but I’m sure you will have that chance in the future. This is too good to disappear into the ether without spawning other appeareances, derivative works or both.

26 April, 2019
The genius of Rupert Murdoch and why we all need to pay attention…

BRIAN COYNE

This is in response to the recent New York Time’s commentary on the Empire of Rupert Murdoch, P&I 5th April. Murdoch’s insight has been passed to many of the publishers of commercial media and political parties. It has damaged society and there’s no easy way for it to be countered.

In 1998 Rupert Murdoch received a Papal Knighthood

Since Moses was a boy, one of the universal challenges of any person who needs to communicate, sell, preach, or evangelise, is of communicating to the maximum number of people at the smallest cost per person. It’s a maxim in trade, politics, religion and any form of communications. It’s the fundamental dynamic that undergirds the entire advertising industry. The vast majority of the population scarcely pay attention to the techniques used to attract their attention.

Larger audiences at the lowest cost

In recent history where trade, business and sales are perceived as vital to modern capitalist economies, this search for communications pathways has become more important than ever.

We are familiar with the way businesses and political parties seek out demographic segments. We see ’boutique businesses’ catering for the wealthy, or people seeking products that will ‘set them apart’. We see businesses, and political parties, targeting demographic segments such as the migrant vote, the blue collar vote, and so on.

The ‘genius’ of Rupert Murdoch is that he identified a sector of the population that is far larger than all the rest put together. Many, including the authors of the NYT’s study, mistake this for some ‘conservative sector’ in society. I’d argue that is a by-product of the brilliance of what Rupert discovered. Initially, his challenge was the changing media and technological landscape that was stealing the audiences that underpinned profits, largely sourced from advertising, in his newspapers. His quest has been to find a new audience to replace those who were no longer buying his newspapers and tuning in to his television and radio stations. Rupert is not stupid. What he came up with was sheer genius. It has not only delivered him wealth beyond imagination; it has also delivered him power to manipulate vast, even national audiences and populations.

Where did the inspiration come from?

Who knows how he came up with this strategic breakthrough? There might be a Catholic connection. Rupert isn’t a Catholic, but in 1967 he married his second wife, Anna Torv, a Catholic. Together they had three children, Elizabeth, Lachlan and James. The two boys are in contention to eventually be the successors to inherit their father’s empire. That ‘Catholic connection’ eventually led to Rupert being made a papal knight – a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, KCSG – in 1998, three months before he split with Anna. You can read more at this article in the Los Angeles Times where a pile of these knighthoods were handed out like confetti to people who helped fund the reconstruction and refurbishment of Cardinal Roger Mahony’s cathedral in Los Angeles.

Back in 1979 another Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, who subsequently became Pope Benedict XVI, made an observation about the ordinary pew-sitters in the Church. In a homily he stated, “The Christian believer is a simple person: bishops should protect the faith of these little people against the power of intellectuals.” While only a small number of people in the educated, affluent, first world heard or read those words, it seems about 90% of the baptised picked up that it was how the hierarchs were going to treat them: as “little and simple people who needed to be protected from intellectuals”. In other words, Catholicism was for simpletons. The majority gave up listening and participating across the Western world.

There is insight and wisdom in Cardinal Ratzinger’s words…

Yet, I would argue, there was actually a lot of insight and wisdom in the future pope’s words, beside the fact that it reflected the outlook of the majority of bishops in what they saw as their chief role of protecting ‘the faithful’ from intellectuals and from thinking for themselves. More importantly, this insight is also linked to the genius insight of Rupert Murdoch KCSG.

The sad truth is that the majority of the human population do not aspire to be intellectuals or to devote a lot of energy to thinking about what they see as esoteric theories, and rules and laws in such fields as theology, politics, economics or even the sciences. They want, even demand, ‘simple answers’ answers than can be digested in three sentences and simple slogans. Look at how few people join political parties these days compared to the total population. Participation in political parties is declining as rapidly across the Western world as participation in religion.

Rupert’s genius insight is that most of the population want ‘simple answers’. Above all else they want a little bit of security. Yes, some of them do aspire to be as rich as the Murdoch family, but most are simply content to preserve what they already have. Insurance and superannuation have become massive growth industries. So have personal development courses offering people forms of security and the opportunity to ‘get ahead’. But they’re not going to invest a huge amount of intellectual, mental and emotional energy thinking about it.

The Romans learned this long ago. They built huge stadiums to entertain and distract the masses from having to think too much. This is also one of the inheritances of the institutional Catholic Church from Emperor Constantine and his successors: Keep It Simple for the masses. Provide them with what are essentially emotional distractions, such as superstitions and simple pieties, and big dollops of anxiety and fear about eternal damnation. Perhaps somewhere between 60 and 70% in any population operate out of this mindset.

Rupert Murdoch reads the minds, needs and wants of the populations where he operates better than any priest, politician or pope. He feeds them what they most want: wall-to-wall, 24/7 entertainment and distraction. All the major commercial media have borrowed his formula and today offer this constant diet of over-the-top sentimentality mixed in with slogans to generate anxiety and envy about others. Politicians also have adopted his genius and now offer ‘slogan solutions’: “Stop the Boats”; “Build a Wall”; “Make Us Great Again”.

None of it is about genuine conservatism. It’s an exercise in stirring up sentimentality – getting people crying on television is a common trick in commercial current affairs programs and talk-back radio – and then stirring up anxiety, anger and venting about somebody who’s going to steal your job or rip off all your hard-won assets.

Rupert was merely trying to maintain the audiences that had once caused the rivers of gold to flow through classified advertising in his newspapers. Stirring up the basest human instincts in the ‘fight or flight’ responses gave him access to a far larger audience than anything that could be expected through appealing to any particular demographic or sub-sector of the population. The truth is all of us have this ‘fight or flight’ instinct that is as old as humanity. Some refer to it as the ‘lizard’ part of our brain that we share in common with the lowest animals. It utilises a technique that appeals to those with a narcissistic streak who know how to exploit populations for their own acquisition of wealth or power.

What’s the answer to Rupert’s genius?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to how any nation can respond to this. We’re dealing with forces in the human psyche that are more powerful than virtually any other force known to humankind. We see it manifested in the increasing instability emerging all over our planet today: from Britain with Brexit and the refugee problems in Europe, to Trump’s efforts to build a wall in the United States. We see it in the political and economic instability in countries like Venezuela, Brazil, the Philippines, Italy, Hungary and even France.

We need to confront the narcissistic leaders who are exploiting this. But we also need to tame the insecurities and anxieties of this vast population who seek simple answers, hate ideas, thinking and intellectuals, and who think and act in very shallow ways. The task, and challenge, is not going to be easy.

Brian Coyne is editor and Publisher of the online website www.catholica.com.au

13 April, 2019
Swedish implant microchips in craze to go cashless

Cash free is the hip way to transact in Stokholm

From the Financial Post via John James Newsletter

More than 4,000 Swedes have gone the microchip route as cash use fades and the government scrambles to figure out the effects on society and the economy. The central bank, which predicts cash may fade from Sweden, is testing a digital currency — an e-krona — to keep firm control of the money supply. Lawmakers are exploring the fate of online payments and bank accounts if an electrical grid fails or servers are thwarted by power failures, hackers or even war.

7 January, 2019
The John James Newsletter 268

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Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.
John Pilger

Help one person at a time, and start with the one nearest to you.
Mother Teresa

The Plague Species grows by nearly 1/4 million daily. Extinctions (excluding micro organisms) and toxification will only worsen.
Steve Kurtz

This was not a good year for journalists. 80 members of the press have been killed in 2018, at least 60 are currently being held hostage, and nearly 350 are being detained. Of those who were killed over 40 were targeted murders. Julian Assange still held hostage.
Reporters Without Borders

Who will rebuild after a climate disaster as workers retire and weather worsens? We simply don’t have enough tradespeople to rebuild after an event. Presently we are three months out from the next tornados hitting Ottawa and there are whole apartment units that haven’t been touched and are filled with snow because there hasn’t been anybody available to work on them.
David Burke

‘Conservation never ends’: 40 years in the kingdom of gorillas
While studying Rwanda’s critically endangered mountain gorillas in the 1970s, newlywed graduate students Amy Vedder and Bill Weber learned that the government was considering converting gorilla habitat into a cattle ranch. At the time, conventional wisdom held that the mountain gorillas would inevitably go extinct. But Vedder and Weber believed the species could be saved, and proposed a then-revolutionary ecotourism scheme to the Rwandan government. Forty years later, that scheme has proved its worth. Mountain gorilla populations have rebounded, and tourism generates hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Vedder and Weber now work to inspire the next generation of conservationists both in Rwanda and abroad.
PIC A year of hard-fought wins in conservation
There were other things happening out there too: conservation successes, huge wins for global health, more peace and tolerance, less war and violence, rising living standards, some big clean energy milestones, and a quiet turning of the tide in the fight against plastic. Stories of human progress, that didn’t make it into the evening broadcasts, or onto your social media feeds.

And for more happy news click here.
Lets hope we may be in time
In 2017, Darebin Council in Victoria, Australia, became the first council in the world to declare a climate emergency. They wrote a Climate Emergency Plan and in 2018 held a Climate Emergency Conference. https://www.yoursaydarebin.com.au/climateaction
Recently, London became the third city in the UK to declare a Climate Emergency, after Bristol and Manchester, with Totnes and Stroud following soon after. The London emergency transition program will include retrofitting buildings, creating a national electricity system that runs without creating greenhouse gas emissions, and electrifying the transportation system.
There are now 21 councils and cities that have declared a climate emergency and eight of these declarations were in the last two weeks!
In the US, The Climate Mobilization succeeded in having emergency climate action and a World War two-scale mobilisation written into the platform of the Democratic Party. Newly elected Democrats are pushing hard for a Green New Deal.

So, now we have the story. Stage wars in small S**hole countries to strike terror, and against the bigger more determined like Russia and China only threaten and rattle the sabres, but under no circumstances risk a real war. That might hurt. The expensive might of America may be used only to destroy the weak but merely to bully the strong.

The Pentagon Wants You to Go Shopping While the Experts Go to War
People are calling the US wars failures – Afghanistan, Syria, etc. But suppose this was not their purpose? Suppose the most powerful military on earth was not created to conquer but to destabilise and overawe? Suppose that institutional instability was the real aim? The benefits are many. People in these countries are then too busy surviving to prevent the theft of their assets; leadership too fragmented to construct a defence against the Empire; nations too deeply in shock to realise what is being done to them. In this scenario every country should be made into willing allies – like the UK and Australia – or shambles. Then there is nobody to oppose the Imperial will.
Americans are in the dark about the near-global warfare being waged in their name. Societal degradation and democratic implosion, caused in part by endless phoney war and the lies associated with it, are this country’s real existential enemies, even if you can’t find them listed in any National Defence Strategy. Indeed, the price tag for America’s wars may in the end prove not just heavy but catastrophic.Iceland elects 41-year-old environmentalist as prime minister
One of the most well-liked politicians in Iceland, Katrín, a former education minister and avowed environmentalist, has pledged to set Iceland on the path to carbon neutrality by 2040. As Iceland’s fourth prime minister in only two years, Katrín will take office at a time when national politics have been tainted by public distrust and scandal. A democratic socialist, Katrín is viewed as a bridge-building leader that may lead the country towards positive, incremental change. “She is the party leader who can best unite voters from the left and right,”
Democratic Party Platform
The US cannot wait for another nation to lead the world in combating the global climate emergency. We must move first in launching a green industrial revolution, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because it is in our own national interest to do so. Our generation now must lead a World War II-type national mobilisation to save civilisation from catastrophic consequences. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, climate experts, policy experts, activists and indigenous communities to chart a course toward the healthy future we all want for our families and communities.40 years ago we had the chance to save the planet.
In the 1970s it was clear we needed to act on fossil fuels, and even the big producers supported action. By 183 the voices of caution and uncertainty were dampening any sense of urgency. Within ten years the sense of urgency was gone and the US government and the press moved to counter action. Attention was concentrated on diversions, such as the hole in the ozone layer which took the pressure off the fossil fuel industry. Inaction has just solidified since then, with hints of progress to still the opposition.

Rise of carbon dioxide–absorbing mountains in tropics may set thermostat for global climate
Many mountains in Indonesia and neighbouring Papua New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from the ocean floor that were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain of island volcanoes and a continent, and thrust high. Lashed by tropical rains, these rocks hungrily react with CO2 and sequester it in minerals. That is why, with only 2% of the world’s land area, Indonesia accounts for 10% of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why ice sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years (although they are now threatened by global warming). Now, researchers have extended that theory, finding that such tropical mountain-building collisions coincide with nearly all of the half-dozen significant glacial periods in the past 500 million years.

5G Network Uses Same EMF Waves as Pentagon Crowd Control System

If anyone thinks that mass protests and marching on the streets is going to achieve anything, then watch these two. If the streets can be cleared how do our greater numbers have any impact. With this system, now well-developed in China, you wont want to march any more – not if the pollies feel threatened. A new strategy is needed. Its urgent to consider this, for the media is owned by the fossil fuel industry and the internet and social media can be switched off at the first hint of real trouble. Do we have any other role than to be consumers? ?????
And to this add swarms of miniature killer drones, and we the people may be forced to stay home and be mindlessly entertained.

Active Denial with 5G

Is this an answer?

620 KM Long Women’s Wall of Kerala Challenges Brahmanical Patriarchy
About 3-5 million women formed a wall across Kerala to protect to protect Kerala’s renaissance values and for women empowerment. About three million women stood shoulder to shoulder across Kerala and formed 620 KM “wall” from Thiruvananthapuram to the northern district of Kasaragod. They also pledged to protect the renaissance values of Kerala. The wall was organised against the backdrop of the Supreme Court verdict on Sabarimala temple entry of menstruating women. Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the wall was to save Kerala being ‘dragged back into the era of darkness’. The wall saw massive participation cutting across class/caste/religious barriers. Expressing solidarity, thousands of men also lined up parallel forming a second human ‘wall’.
PIC
The Gathering Climate Storm and the Media Cover-up
With the exception of the few who comprehend the nature of a Faustian Bargain, some billionaires, captains of industry and their political and media mouthpieces are driving humanity toward self-destruction through the two biggest enterprises on Earth, the fossil fuel industry, which is devastating the Earth atmosphere, and the industrial-military machine leading toward nuclear war. The rest of the world is dragged subconsciously, induced by bread and circuses.
The Emissions Gap Report 2018 from the UN lays out the past failure with brutal clarity.
This year will most likely be the fourth warmest year on record since 1880, with the past five years the warmest ever recorded. Worse, in 2017 emissions increased once again, after three years of stagnation. We are still to turn this corner.
Furthermore, the “determined commitments” made in Paris in 2015, would be insufficient, even if implemented, to keep the temperature below 1.5C. Instead, current commitments imply global warming of about 3C, with warming continuing afterwards. Moreover, the shift has to start now.
The commitments announced so far are inadequate. The climate talks in Katowice, Poland, have not changed this, particularly now that the US is an egregious free-rider. Yet, even without US backsliding, the commitments are inadequate.
What makes this so depressing is that a zero-carbon economy is now both feasible and affordable. The tragedy is that while the scientists and technologists have won the argument, the climate sceptics and deniers have effectively won the policy debate: we are doing far too little, far too late.Here’s what may be driving a US troop withdrawal from Syria
Turkish forces want to push their troops into Syria. The U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds want to keep the Turkish forces out. And the U.S. has struggled for months to keep both players happy.mA confrontation between the U.S and Turkey, officially NATO allies, would create a geopolitical crisis at the heart of the world’s most powerful military alliance.

National debt interest will soon exceed national defence spending
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the interest payments will surpass Medicaid costs within 18 months and that they will exceed all national defence spending by 2023. By 2025, the interest will surge past the combined totals of all non-defence discretionary programs together, including funding for national parks, scientific research, health care, education, the court system and infrastructure. Between now and 2023 nearly three-quarters of the federal debt will mature and must be refinanced at whatever the presumably higher interest rates are in effect then.

$800M in Taxpayer Money Went to Funding For-Profit Immigrant Prisons in 2018
While President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda has been disastrous—and deadly—for asylum-seekers fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, a Daily Beast investigation published on Thursday found that the White House’s xenophobic policies have been a major boon for the private prison industry at the expense of American taxpayers.The beginning of the water wars
There is no doubt, Egypt will be in serious problems if the level of the Nile actually sinks. And it is not only Ethiopia with its new Renaissance Dam threatening the water flow of the Nile. The African countries around Lake Victoria also make their claims. East Africa seeks more Nile water from Egypt. Egypt considers such claims as a declaration of war. The countries recognise that, without co-operation, if you add climate change and growing populations the future is a very risky. Egypt and Ethiopia have tried their best to defuse the potential armed conflict, and with some success so far. The negotiations are based on the Nile water treaty of 1929, in which Egypt and Sudan were given rights to a stipulated amount of water and safeguard Egypt’s historic rights by giving Egypt full reservations on any agreement concerning the flow of the water. The East African countries no longer accept old agreements made by the colonial rulers in the Nile countries.

Peak Trump
Whatever you might think of Trump’s record in office, the last two years were something of a honeymoon for Donald Trump. The president will never again have so many levers of power at his disposal. After the mid-term elections, the Democrats control the House of Representatives by a significant margin of more than 30 seats, and able to block Trump’s legislative agenda. They will also use their control of committees to launch multiple investigations into Trump personally (such as his tax returns), into his 2016 campaign (including campaign financing), and into the actions of his administration (for instance, the use of his office to increase his family’s wealth). In 2019, Trump will face greater pressure from the investigation by Robert Mueller. So far, this investigation under the auspices of the FBI has resulted in five guilty verdicts for Trump associates.
Growth of CO₂ in the atmosphere to be accelerating.
And it’s not just carbon dioxide emissions that are rising. Methane emissions are rising as well. Sadly, politicians typically ignore this elephant in the room, i.e. seafloor methane emissions that threaten to trigger a huge temperature rise within years. In December sea surface temperature anomalies were as high as 8.9°C in the Pacific and as high as 10.1°C in the Atlantic. Albedo change is one of the feedbacks that the IPCC has yet to come to grips with, and merely hoped it would somehow compensated for by albedo gain in the Antarctic.

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5 January, 2019