OK to lie around here

I attended an excellent little event this evening outside News Ltd's Sydney headquarters. It was convened by GetUp! and it was a lie-in.
 










As some of the posters explained, it's OK to lie here. That's what News Ltd  have been doing for quite a while, after all. Especially on the subject of climate change, to the detriment of the country, and the whole planet in fact.

Today's Chinatown special: face masks

Chinese New Year celebrations have gone very quiet this year, amongst the worldwide hysteria about the new coronavirus. This was the scene I came across this afternoon in Dixon St.

A star runs out of juice? Explodes?

The bushfire smoke has pretty well cleared,  and sometimes we're even getting clear night skies. It was time to take a look at poor old Betelgeuse.



Betelgeuse, nowadays usually pronounced 'Beetle Juice' for some reason, is in trouble. It's well known to be a variable star, with its magnitude fluctuating typically between 0.0 and 1.3. It's an orange-red colour, and it's usually the second brightest star in Orion, the Hunter.

Top left is my picture from last night. Betelgeuse is not even a first magnitude star.

Here's a picture I took in March 2016. That's the Betelgeuse we knew and loved!

It's known that this sort of behaviour in a variable star can be indicative of an imminent supernova explosion. Watch out for this. It would be the brightest thing in the sky apart from the sun. It's fortunately about 700 light years distant. If it was one of the closer stars it could fry us along with all other life on the planet!

'Imminent' in this context means any time in the next 100,000 years, but you never know. It could be tomorrow! Here's a piece from Forbes magazine about a Betelgeuse explosion: Forbes Betelgeuse explosion article

After the fires - green shoots

Or pink shoots more often. Signs of life re-establishing itself. It's going to be much harder this time, such was the scale of the destruction and the heat of the fires.

The green shoots that might really matter are the slight glimmerings of climate change awareness at last appearing among some, but by no means all, members of the weirdly ignorant Australian conservative political classes. There again, maybe I'm deluding myself.

After the fires - Echo Point

The view over the Jamison Valley to Mount Solitary and the Ruined Castle. From here at least,  it's not looking too bad, in that in many areas the fire appears not to have destroyed the forest canopy.


I was here a few weeks ago, during the height of the 'Ruined Castle Fire'. Couldn't see much then because of the smoke. See my report: I see no fires

The Ruined Castle itself sits just behind the very brown area in the middle distance below.

After the fires - Govetts Leap

 

That was the Grose Valley down there.

After the fires - the Darling Causeway

Looking west, to Hartley Vale

After the fires - Mt Wilson

I didn't like the look of things as I drove in towards Mt Wilson. It's a beautiful but peculiarly isolated and fire-exposed little Blue Mountains village. And the bush all around was very burnt and black.











But miracles happen, or more to the point, the Rural Fire Service volunteers made one happen. Most of the place, including most - but not all - of the houses and the parks, were saved. The Fire Captain herself was one who lost her home.

After the fires - Mt Banks

I drove on a bit further along Bells Line of Road to check out Mt Banks. That's one of the rounded humpy things you can generally see in the distance from all over Sydney. It's now a very black, burnt-out humpy thing. The bush in the foreground has green patches, I noticed. As in other areas, the tree canopy hasn't been uniformly burnt. Which is good news I guess.

After the fires - Mt Tomah

The Botanic Garden at Mt Tomah had a very close shave during the fires. The brave firies and the staff members put in a lot of work and saved it from the grim fate that befell most of the bushland all around it. It's now open again, and most of it is a green and pleasant oasis.














By contrast, this is the view of the western side of the mountain

After the fires - A burnt out Bells Line

Today was the day to get out there and see what the fires have done to the Blue Mountains. The 'Gospers Mountain', 'Grose Valley', and 'Ruined Castle' fires are finally out, and the recent rains have been and gone.


I headed on up the Bells Line of Road, out past Kurrajong, through Bilpin and beyond.

The volunteer firies are the nation's heroes, of course. Funny that nobody seems to be thanking the Government for anything. Wonder why!

The fires were so hot that the soil is likely to be totally sterilised. Much of the native vegetation needs fire to regenerate. But that might not work when the soil is completely dead. And with a billion or more vertebrate animals incinerated, many whole species driven to likely extinction, and an expected explosion of feral predator numbers, things are not looking good in the native animal department.

I wasn't the only photographer out there today. In fact there might even be a photography-led-recovery going on in the Blue Mountains' economy. There were very few visitors for quite a while there.

There's a certain beauty in all this devastation. But there's been huge suffering too. And it may well never recover its old beauty.

Dry, drier, driest

  

The Centennial Park ponds are extremely dry right now, after this worst of all droughts. I went to check them out today.









Here's Busbys Pond.


















This one is Kensington Pond.




























The driest of them all is Randwick Pond.

Fuelling our climate crisis: criminal media moguls and moronic politicians

Here's what Australia's so-called national newspaper had to say yesterday on its front page about the bushfires literally burning up the country: Nothing!

Here it is, alongside a selection of international papers:

Photo courtesy of the Guardian Australia. I heartily recommend the Guardian article:
Odd one out

Take a look too at the rather fine reports about the PM's unbelievable incompetence in dealing with the fire emergency, and intransigence regarding climate change mitigation or even acknowledgement usually:
'Climate lunatics' article
'Politics has to change' article
'PR nous deserted him' article

We voted this government in again last May. They're largely uninformed, incompetent fools. They have little knowledge of, or interest in, reality or managing it. They're highly skilled only in managing perceptions. They're the government we deserve. Except it wasn't just a matter of us the voters making our choices. Those choices were 'informed' by media moguls like the one who controls most of the Australian print media. His newspapers have for years now featured daily rants about the non-existence of human-induced climate change and the evils of clean energy. Our commercial radio stations are full of horrendous 'shock jocks' spouting all the same stuff. It's surely been a criminal level of misinformation.

Hotter

I said that today could be even worse. Well, it was!

Hot

It just kept getting hotter yesterday afternoon. It was the day we'd been warned about. South East Australia has been literally on fire for months, and it's only getting worse. Here in Sydney's northern suburbs it was hot, hot, hot.

Today was much cooler, but there's  little prospect of rain any time soon, and this Saturday could be even worse fire weather than yesterday was.