November 1, 2022

 

Hello everyone,

It was .25% points rise in Australia on Tuesday by the RBA.

What will it be on Wednesday by the Fed?  .75% or .50%

The market is treading water today waiting for the announcement and the press conference.   

The job market is still hot with job openings surging in September, despite the Fed’s efforts to cool the market.

So, we just must wait.

Continuing from where I left off on the story about climate change and what our future will look like.

Let’s think about Africa for a moment.

Droughts and heat waves and thriving economically are just not a match anywhere.  According to the African Development Bank, the continent is already losing up to 15% of its economic growth because of climate change.  

At just over one degree of temperature rise, climate change may already have worsened global income inequality by as much as 25%.

It will become increasingly dangerous to work outside in the hottest part of the day.   Many residents will be trapped indoors because of the heat.  Governments may introduce policies related to outdoor labor as the world gets hotter.  

When I worked as a jillaroo in outback Australia, both jackaroos and jillaroos started at around 4am in the morning in peak summer months, rested in shade or inside during the heat of the day, and then worked again from about 3-4pm up until 9:00pm.  It was the only safe way to do the work in the heat. 

 

And what about our reefs?

In the new world, there will probably be zero living coral reefs.

This will have far-reaching effects.

Food harvested directly from corals supplies protein for hundreds of millions of people today.  And maybe a quarter of all global ocean biodiversity depends on reefs, all of which are believed to be imminently endangered.

The world’s oceans will grow more acidic which will affect the marine food chain.

 

How high will sea levels rise?

Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 20 feet.  And the Antarctic would raise them considerably more than that.  But we won’t see a lot of that this century.  Already tens of billions of tons of ice are melting into the oceans every year but given the size of the planet, the rate feels slow.  

There is one thing we do know and that is that the sea levels will continue to rise – forever.

 

Our food

At two degrees of warming, yield declines are expected for most staple crops.  Some are estimating that 40% of today’s cropland is expected to experience severe drought at least three months a year by 2050.

These challenges will bring about new seeds, new fertilizer, and new farming methods.

 

Weather disasters

More intense, more frequent.

…over a third of the world’s population would be hit with severe heat waves once every five years. (NYT)

None of us will ever forget the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, which killed approximately three billion animals.  Do you remember the effect of the smoke over Sydney?

 

Ferries couldn’t run

Fire alarms in office buildings were continually set off by the smoke

It was a health hazard to walk outside.

The NYT reports that in India, there could be 30 times as many severe heat waves as today lasting five times as long on average.

Solar and wind power will be the energy of the future.  But other forms of energy could also be possible.  Think about green hydrogen, geothermal or next generation nuclear.

Battery technology will be updated and modernized.

The demand for Lithium could possibly grow eightfold by 2030.

There are projects planned for drilling for minerals at the deepest parts of the ocean floor, and China is even thinking about sourcing elements from the moon. 

A quarter of a million people could die annually from climate-related causes.

The climate impacts are only half the story.  The other half will be told by our response to climate change.  We won’t stop the constant climate crises in our world now, but how we manage them and build a future around them will be critically important.

Cheers,

Jacque

 

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci