Unions back next school strike in Australia ahead of 2019 federal election   

They were reprimanded for skipping school to protest against climate change, but Australia’s school strikers now want others to join them.

news.com.au February 11, 2019






EXCLUSIVE

School students striking for climate change want adults to join them for a global event on March 15, and organisers say they already have support from a growing number of unions.

Despite the criticism strikers copped from Prime Minister Scott Morrison for skipping classes last year, school students around Australia are planning to walk out of school again for another rally ahead of the federal election.   

This time they are also urging adults to back the strike and also walk out for the day in solidarity.

This year’s event is already being supported by a growing number of unions including the National Union of Workers, National Tertiary Education Union, United Firefighters Union, Hospo Voice, the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association and the National Union of Students.

The National Union of Workers, one of the most powerful unions in the Labor Party and part of its right-wing faction that supports Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, said it was supporting the strike and the students standing together collectively for their future.

“They are inspiring leaders, and we support them in making our political leaders listen,” the union said.   


More than 300 academics have also signed an open letter in solidarity with the student strikers supporting their stance against Adani’s Carmichael mine and a ban on gas mining.

The strikes created headlines last year when more than 15,000 students took the day off school to protest the lack of action on climate change, rallying in public spaces in Melbourne, Sydney and about 30 other cities and towns in Australia.

This year’s event, coming ahead of the federal election, is expected to be even bigger with organisers telling news.com.au students are extending an open invitation to everyone in the community to join them.   

The school strike is gaining traction around the world. Australia’s March 15 event will also coincide with school protests in more than 40 other countries.


Striking high school students march to protest for a more effective government climate change policy on January 25, 2019 in Berlin, Germany.




The School Strike 4 Climate on November 30 was originally inspired by 15-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, who has been protesting for climate change action in Stockholm.

Australian students defied calls from the PM to stay in school after Mr Morrison said: “What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”

They also held another protest about a week later after Adani announced it would self-fund its Carmichael mine.

“We may still be in school, but we know the mining and burning of fossil fuels are driving dangerous climate impacts, including natural disasters, droughts, bushfires, and heatwaves,” 14-year-old Castlemaine student Milou Albrecht said.

She said politicians had lost touch with the Australian people.

“Extreme weather is all around us, and with 2019 an election year, it’s time our politicians showed leadership,” she said.

“We only have a decade to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, yet our politicians are wasting time and putting our future in danger.”

Fellow striker Harriet O’Shea Carre, 14, said Adani’s coal mine needed to be stopped and Australia should be put on a rapid path to 100 per cent renewable energy to ensure young people had a safe future.    

“As school students, we’re sick of being ignored,” she said. “We’re sick of our futures being turned into political footballs.

“It’s time for our politicians to stop making decisions about us without us.”

She said students would not stop striking until they got the action they deserved.

If teachers and students were doing the job properly in schools perhaps they would be producing more qualified women that would be suitable for parliament

whiteknight wrote on Feb 28^th, 2019 at 10:45pm:


So they disagree with the IPCC? Oh dear.

"Floods

"There was low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and magnitude of floods. WGII AR5 also concluded that there is no evidence that surface water and groundwater drought
frequency has changed over the last few decades, although impacts of drought have increased mostly owing to increased water demand (Jiménez Cisneros et al., 2014)"

Drought

"The IPCC AR5 assessed that there was low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at the global scale, but that there was high confidence in observed trends in some regions of the world, including drought increases in the Mediterranean and West Africa and drought decreases in central North America and northwest Australia (Hartmann et al., 2013; Stocker et al., 2013). AR5 assessed that there was low confidence in the attribution of global changes in droughts and did not provide assessments for the attribution of regional changes in droughts (Bindoff et al., 2013a).

The recent literature does not suggest that the SREX and AR5 assessment of drought trends should be revised, except in the Mediterranean region. "

Cyclones

"Numerous studies leading up to and after AR5 have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy (Emanuel, 2005; Elsner et al., 2008; Knutson et al., 2010; Holland and Bruyère, 2014; Klotzbach and Landsea, 2015; Walsh et al., 2016). A theoretical physical basis for such a decrease to occur under global warming was recently provided by Kang and Elsner (2015). However, using a relatively short (20 year) and relatively homogeneous remotely sensed record, Klotzbach (2006) reported no significant trends in global cyclonic activity, consistent with more recent findings of Holland and Bruyère (2014). Such contradictions, in combination with the fact that the almost fourdecade-long period of remotely sensed observations remains relatively short to distinguish anthropogenically induced trends from decadal and multi-decadal variability, implies that there is only low confidencev regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades."

Precipitation

"Observed global changes in the water cycle, including precipitation, are more uncertain than observed changes in temperature (Hartmann et al., 2013; Stocker et al., 2013). There is high confidence that mean precipitation over the mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere has increased since 1951 (Hartmann et al., 2013). For other latitudinal zones, area-averaged long-term positive or negative trends have low confidence because of poor data quality, incomplete data or disagreement amongst available estimates (Hartmann et al., 2013). There is, in particular, low confidence regarding observed trends in precipitation in monsoon regions, according to the SREX report (Seneviratne et al., 2012) and AR5 (Hartmann et al., 2013), as well as more recent publications (Singh et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 2017; Bichet and Diedhiou, 2018; see Supplementary Material 3.SM.2)."

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/

Then of course bushfires (wildfires) -

"Fire is an essential Earth system process that alters ecosystem and atmospheric composition. Here we assessed long-term fire trends using multiple satellite data sets. We found that global burned area declined by 24.3 ± 8.8% over the past 18 years. The estimated decrease in burned area remained robust after adjusting for precipitation variability and was largest in savannas. Agricultural expansion and intensification were primary drivers of declining fire activity. Fewer and smaller fires reduced aerosol concentrations, modified vegetation structure, and increased the magnitude of the terrestrial carbon sink. Fire models were unable to reproduce the pattern and magnitude of observed declines, suggesting that they may overestimate fire emissions in future projections. Using economic and demographic variables, we developed a conceptual model for predicting fire in human-dominated landscapes."

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1356

Maybe they are looking at alternate extreme climate?