Year 2, Month 10, Day 13: I Never Has Seen Snow

The Sydney Morning Herald for October 10 notes that the Australian Alps are going to lose all their snow by 2050 if things go on this way:

AUSTRALIA’S ski slopes could be completely bare of natural winter snow by 2050 unless concerted action is taken against global warming, according to a government-commissioned report that paints a grim picture of the effects of climate change on alpine areas.

The report, Caring For Our Australian Alps Catchments, has found that the Alps, which stretch from Victoria through NSW to the ACT, face an average temperature rise of between 0.6 and 2.9 degrees by 2050, depending on how much action countries take to combat climate change.

”The effects of climate change are predicted to be the single greatest threat to the natural condition values of the Australian Alps catchments,” the report says.

I didn’t even know there were Alps in Australia. Sent October 9 (because it’s already tomorrow in Australia):

There is less wiggle room than ever before for those who would deny the facts of global climate change. For several decades it has been possible to ignore the predictions of climatologists as they assessed the likely shape of a post-greenhouse-effect planet; after all, all those dire things were going to happen sometime in the indefinite future, so there was time enough to worry about them later on.

Well, as the recently released report on the future of Australia’s Alps demonstrates, the “indefinite future” is no longer “indefinite.” Indeed, it’s hardly even “future”; as ski-slope operators must be realizing right about now, a few decades isn’t much time to prepare for such drastic environmental transformations.

All over the world, climatologists’ predictions are coming true much faster than anyone expected. It behooves us to pay attention to what they’ve been saying for years — and to what they’re saying now.

Warren Senders

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