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A Breakup Letter from the U.S. Government to Big Oil
By Meghana Indurti and Lucia Whalen
April 22, 2022
Dear Big Oil,
This is hard for me, the government, to write, because I love you so much, and we’ve been together for so long that I can barely imagine life without you. But I feel that our relationship is toxic and that you’ve been manipulating me for years.
When I previously tried standing up to you, you said that you’d stop giving me money. And I love money. I do. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. You really need to love it (money) to work in politics, or else the late hours get old fast.
But we are quickly arriving at a climate catastrophe, and it feels like you don’t even care?
I see now that your behavior for the past century has honestly been sort of insane. Like, there were so many red flags from the beginning.
I should have left you after the first oil spill. But I told myself, “This was an accident, there’s no way he’s gonna keep spilling oil, that would be crazy.” But then you just kept spilling oil! You’ve spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons. I can’t keep cleaning up your messes!
Sure, it wasn’t always bad. Remember when you powered your first car? Beep beep! I loved that little thing.
But then cars increased carbon pollution to the point that temperatures started warming. And you tried to hide it from me and fuck up all my efforts to offer better public transportation. We’re supposed to support each other!
When we first met I was, like, O.K., he’s into coal—not ideal, but he’ll grow out of that, right? Everyone has a coal phase! But, babe, it’s been more than a century.
Then you started drilling for oil, and I was, like, O.K., oil isn’t renewable. This has gotta be a temporary thing. But now I realize these weren’t phases—it’s who you are.
Do you know how embarrassing it was when I found out that it wasn’t just arsenic but also benzene, formaldehyde, lead, mercury, and two hundred other toxins that you had in your fracking roster? Behind my back?!
God, all you fossil-fuel companies are the same.
So that’s it. Here are my conditions if you want to be with me and make this relationship work:
STOP FRACKING NOW. Or, like, as soon as you can.
I’m not totally unreasonable. I don’t want to lose the millions of dollars I have invested in you overnight. So, if you absolutely think it’s necessary or you really need to frack, I get it. Change is hard! But if you don’t change you will literally destroy the entire planet.
Soaring emissions are producing acid rain and smog, and soon every city is going to look like Gotham City—which, like, worst-case scenario, I can turn into a tourist attraction. Maybe I can get Zoë Kravitz involved? Charge an additional fee for Batman-themed masks if people want to avoid breathing toxic fumes? Hmm.
Wait, ugh, no. It’s so easy to fall back into old patterns with you. . . .
No more oil pipelines. I really mean it this time. No more tar sands, and no more destroying entire ecosystems to create stations for natural gas. Last time you did that, seventeen different species went extinct!
It’s fine. We all make mistakes. Who needs prairie chickens anyway? But if you don’t stop then I am absolutely gonna be pissed and circle back to this conversation in ten to fifteen years.
The thing is, we’ve been talking about moving away from an economy based on fossil fuels for more than seven decades. That’s twelve Batman reboots ago. There are all these technologies, including solar and wind, which don’t release a toxic stew of air pollution. And I feel like it’s just me fighting for that? I need to know if renewable energy is something you can commit to down the line.
We’re up against the biggest existential crisis that our species has ever faced. Because of you, regions of Australia, North Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Western United States will be inhospitable owing to heat and rising sea levels by 2100. And I get it. Those places aren’t top priority to me, either, but I have to at least pretend to give a shit, don’t I?
A couple of scientists who I couldn’t pay off sat me down and told me that there will be more climate-refugee crises, increased world wars (especially over dwindling fresh-water supplies), and mounting natural disasters.
Call me an old-fashioned romantic, but I want to have kids who aren’t exposed to ancient microbes released from melting permafrost that today’s humans have never been exposed to and that will cause more pandemics.
The thing I really can’t get over is that you knew about this the whole time. In the eighties! And yet not only did you ignore that information but you literally spent millions of dollars to gaslight people into believing that they were imagining it. That’s sociopathic, toxic behavior!
You know that I have a soft spot for you. But our relationship is ruining lives.
If you stop, as a reward I’ll let you pick a part of the planet you can ruin a little bit. On the weekends. Cheat days are important.
I hear Sudan is nice.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-breakup-letter-from-the-us-government-to-big-oil?
Earth Day
Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides. The latest came from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it. This week, as we commemorate Earth Day, we’re underlining the urgency of the situation with a series of pieces from some of our finest writers on the environment. In “The Climate Expert Who Delivered News No One Wanted to Hear,” Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the nasa scientist who offered an early warning about the ramifications of global warming. (Forty-three years ago, Hansen “created one of the world’s first climate models, nicknamed Model Zero, which he used to predict most of what has happened to the climate since. Sometimes he is referred to as the ‘father of global warming,’ and sometimes as the grandfather.”) In “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet,” the science writer Bill McKibben explores some of the ways that radical environmental changes are making parts of the earth uninhabitable. In “Big Foot,” Michael Specter reports on new technologies aimed at reducing our carbon footprint. In “When the Earth Moved,” Nicholas Lemann chronicles the history of Earth Day and ongoing challenges to the environmental movement in America. Finally, in “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson considers the calamitous effects of chemical pollutants on nature and humanity. As one scientist put it to Carson, “We are walking in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet.” In that last case, scientists and the government made changes—effective ones. Are we capable of doing so again in the face of vastly larger challenges?
—David Remnick
INSPECTOR GENERAL -U.S. Department of Defense
A P R I L 1 3 , 2 0 2 2
Report No. DODIG-2022-083
(U) Evaluation of the Department
of Defense’s Efforts to Address
the Climate Resilience of
U.S. Military Installations
in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic
https://media.defense.gov/2022/Apr/15/2002977604/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2022-083.PDF
Climate toll on Arctic bases: Sunken runways, damaged roads
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER yesterday
3 of 3
FILE - This March 17, 2019, photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, shows an aerial view of Offutt Air Force Base and the surrounding areas affected by floodwaters in Nebraska. The U.S. military long has formally recognized climate change as a threat to national security. That's in part because of the impact that intensifying floods, wildfires, extreme heat and other natural disasters are having and will have on U.S. installations and troops around the world.
(Tech. Sgt. Rachelle Blake/U.S. Air Force via AP, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military bases in the Arctic and sub-Arctic are failing to prepare their installations for long-term climate change as required, even though soaring temperatures and melting ice already are cracking base runways and roads and worsening flood risks up north, the Pentagon’s watchdog office said Friday.
The report from the inspector general of the Department of Defense provides a rare bit of public stock-taking of the military’s state of readiness – or lack of readiness – for the worsening weather of a warming Earth. https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-joe-biden-business-lloyd-austin-a5c79e8a005c7c4db8a61cf0e6a4267a
The U.S. military long has formally recognized climate change as a threat to national security. That’s in part because of the impact that intensifying floods, wildfires, extreme heat and other natural disasters are having and will have on U.S. installations and troops around the world.
Increasing hurricanes, flooding, storms and wildfires in recent years have caused billions of dollars in damage to Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base, Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base and other U.S. military installations, and interrupted training and other operations.
For years, laws, presidential orders and Pentagon rules have mandated that the military start planning and work so that its installations, warships, warplanes and troops can carry out their missions despite increasingly challenging conditions as the use of fossil fuels heats up the Earth.
While even acknowledging climate change was a career risk for administration officials under former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden directed faster, more sweeping action on climate change by the Department of Defense and other agencies as one of his first acts in office.
Despite Biden’s emphasis, inspectors visiting the United States’ six northernmost military bases last June and July found none were carrying out the required assessments and planning to prepare their installations and operations against long-term climate change.
Further, “most installation leaders at the six installations we visited in the Arctic and sub-Arctic region were unfamiliar with military installation resilience planning requirements, processes, and tools,” the inspector general reports said.
Senior officers told the inspector general’s inspection team .. https://media.defense.gov/2022/Apr/15/2002977604/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2022-083.PDF .. that their operations lacked the training and funding to start the required work on hardening their bases. Some saw requirements for that kind of long-term planning as assembling a “wish list” that would go up against competing priorities, the officers told the inspectors.
A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The inspector general report cited Defense officials as saying that the Biden administration has finished or is working on many of the report’s recommendations to better incorporate climate preparations at bases and across military branches, and would increase resources to bases to make that possible.
One of the bases is in Greenland and the other five in Alaska: Thule Air Base, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Clear Space Force Station, Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely.
The Arctic and sub-Arctic are important to U.S. strategic aims in part because of rising tensions and competition with Russia and China, and in part because sharply rising temperatures are melting sea ice and opening up both shipping lanes and access to the region’s oil and other resources, increasing interest and traffic in the region.
The Defense Department also sees “the Arctic is a potential vector for an attack on the U.S. homeland, a region where Russia and China are operating more freely, and a strategic corridor for DoD forces between the Indo-Pacific and Europe,” the report notes.
The inspectors found the kind of problems associated with worsening climate change already causing trouble at the U.S. bases.
At Fort Wainwright in Alaska, heightened wildfire risks in 2019 interrupted training for two Pacific Air Force squadrons, so that one was able to carry out only 59% of planned training for a period, the report said.
Many of the specific discussions of climate risks at the six bases were blacked-out in the version of the report made public Friday.
But inspectors photographed and described some. That included cracked and sunken runways undermined by melting ice, damaged hangers and roads, and a collapsed rock barrier that had been piled up to hold back floodwater from a river swollen by glacial melting, at Thule in Greenland.
Leaders at all six bases visited noted that kind of damage, inspectors said, “however, officials from five of these installations said they had not begun incorporating future climate risks into their installations’ planning.”
“They stated that their day-to-day focus was on reacting to immediate problems or reducing risk to existing hazards, rather than planning for future hazards,” the report noted.
The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-environment-and-nature-ed8a508291faa85bbf1ba5ccc5198ecf ..
A March heat wave that hiked Arctic temperatures 50 degrees (30 Celsius) higher than normal stunned scientists. .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34
Of 79 U.S. military installations overall, the Department of Defense says two-thirds are vulnerable to worsening flooding as the climate worsens and half are vulnerable to increasing drought and wildfires.
https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-climate-floods-arctic-fires-9c55de05afeabcdbb6aca2ba322d0458
100 seconds to go "but not everyone dies"
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168481186
In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics
Tiny bits of plastic have infiltrated the deep sea’s main food source and could alter the ocean’s role in one of Earth’s ancient cooling processes, scientists say.
By Sabrina Imbler
April 3, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.
The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.
Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.
Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.
Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.
“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”
Marine snow-making
ImagePlastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.
Plastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Credit...Agung Parameswara/Getty Images
The sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.
Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.
Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”
Image
A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.
A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.Credit...Morgan Trimble/Alamy
Microplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.
“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”
To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.
But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.
“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”
Instant marine snow
Image
Experimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.
Experimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.Credit...Luisa Galgani, Chiara Esposito, Paraskevi Pitta
To answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.
In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.
“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”
After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.
Image
Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.
Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.Credit...Adam Porter
Dr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.
In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”
Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.
“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”
A plastic feast
Image
Vampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs.
Vampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs. Credit...Steve Downer/Science Source
To understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.
Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”
Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.
This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.
“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”
Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.
In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.
Image
The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.
The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.Credit...NOAA Ocean Exploration
Dr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.
Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”
Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.
Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/science/ocean-plastic-animals.html
Empty canals, dead cotton fields: Arizona farmers are getting slammed by water cuts in the West
PUBLISHED SUN, APR 3 20228:00 AM EDT
Emma Newburger
@EMMA_NEWBURGER
KEY POINTS
On the drought-stricken land where Pinal County farmers have irrigated crops for thousands of years, Nancy Caywood stopped her pickup truck along an empty canal and pointed to a field of dead alfalfa.
“It’s heart wrenching,” said Caywood, a third-generation farmer who manages 247 acres an hour outside of Phoenix.
An intensifying drought and declining reservoir levels across the Western U.S. prompted the first-ever cuts to Arizona farmers’ water supply from the Colorado River.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/03/arizona-farmers-are-slammed-by-water-cuts-in-the-west-amid-drought.html
Hot poles: Antarctica, Arctic 70 and 50 degrees above normal
By SETH BORENSTEIN March 18, 2022
FILE - A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.
Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.
The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).
It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.
“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time,” Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”
“It’s pretty stunning,” Meier added.
“Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic,” said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent.
“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.
Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”
Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.
The Antarctic warm spell was first reported by The Washington Post.
The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.
At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.
By comparison, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) above the 1979 to 2000 average. Globally the 1979 to 2000 average is about half a degree (.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average.
What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent — except for its vulnerable peninsula which is warming quickly and losing ice rapidly — has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.
Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice — records go back to 1979 — with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.
What likely happened was “a big atmospheric river” pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said.
And in the Arctic, .. https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-environment-and-nature-ed8a508291faa85bbf1ba5ccc5198ecf .. which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.
___
Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34
It’s a cruel and dangerous fantasy that we’ll ever halt climate change by counting on or forcing people to live impoverished lives, forgoing food, medicine, heating, or air conditioning in an increasingly erratic and menacing world.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Arctic will soon see more rain than snow. Scientists say it may speed up global warming.
Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY - 3h ago
Earlier in August, it rained on the summit of Greenland's ice sheet for the first time in recorded history, and new research suggests that it not only will become a normal occurrence, but it will happen much sooner than previously thought.
© Mario Tama, Getty Images
The sun sets as rain falls beyond floating ice and icebergs in Disko Bay above the Arctic Circle on September 04, 2021 in Ilulissat, Greenland. 2021 will mark one of the biggest ice melt years for Greenland in recorded history.
The majority of Greenland is considered part of the Arctic region, along with some of northern Alaska, Canada and Russia.
Known for its frigid temperatures, which average -40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, it snows quite often. The Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in northern Alaska records snow at least eight months of the year, and it has snowed at least once in each month of the year in recorded history. But research published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday shows much of the region will, on average, experience more rain than snow in the future.
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The team of international researchers had previously concluded the region would eventually see more rain, but originally thought it wouldn't start until around 2090. The new analysis on the region determined the rain would dominate the region as early as 2050 in some areas.
The reason for more rain is melting ice. When sea ice melts or breaks away, the open ocean water mixed with rising global temperatures results in more water evaporation, which then leads to rain falling. When Greenland's summit experienced rain earlier this year, temperatures were above freezing for over nine hours, the third time since 2012 it had happened.
"The take-home message from this is really that changes are likely to occur much more rapidly and earlier than previously projected, which of course will mean that the subsequent impacts of this will also occur earlier," Michelle McCrystall, lead researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, told USA TODAY.
Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 656,000-square-miles big, and if it were to completely melt, NASA says the global sea level would rise about 23 feet and Earth's rotation would slow down enough to make the length of a day two milliseconds longer. A recent study showed that ice sheet melting would raise sea levels nearly a foot higher by the end of the century.
[...]
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-arctic-will-soon-see-more-rain-than-snow-scientists-say-it-may-speed-up-global-warming/ar-AARmaG7?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531
Two biggest polluters saying the right things..
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59238869
Ms Thunberg said: "It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place."
She said: "We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.
"The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.
"All this while the world is literally burning, on fire, and while the people living on the front lines are still bearing the brunt of the climate crisis."
She described the UN climate change summit as a "two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah" to "maintain business as usual" and "create loopholes to benefit themselves".
Ms Thunberg added: "We know that our emperors are naked."
He also said he had received thanks from other leaders for bringing the United States back to negotiations after disengagement under former President Donald J. Trump, echoing comments he made at the end of a Group of 20 meeting in Rome on Sunday.
With Methane and Forest Deals, Climate Summit Offers Hope After Gloomy Start
Agreements to reduce methane gas emissions and protect the world’s forests were reached Tuesday at the U.N.-sponsored meeting, as President Biden chided the leaders of Russia and China for not showing up.
By Jim Tankersley, Katie Rogers and Lisa Friedman
Published Nov. 2, 2021
Updated Nov. 4, 2021, 5:44 a.m. ET
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GLASGOW — The world leaders gathered at a crucial climate summit secured new agreements on Tuesday to end deforestation and reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane, building momentum as the conference prepared to shift to a more grueling two weeks of negotiations on how to avert the planet’s catastrophic warming.
Capping off two days of speeches and meetings, President Biden on Tuesday said the United States pledged to be a “partner” with vulnerable countries confronting climate change, while expressing confidence that his own domestic climate agenda is on track to pass Congress despite the wobbling of a key Senate Democrat this week.
Mr. Biden told reporters the meeting had re-established the United States as a leader on what he has called an existential threat to humanity, saying America would keep raising its climate ambitions and that his engagement on the issue had drawn thanks from other heads of state.
He also reproached President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, for not attending the summit.
“We showed up. We showed up,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference at the United Nations summit on climate change, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. “The fact that China is trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader, not showing up? Huh. The single most important thing that’s gotten the attention of the world is climate.”
The most consequential agreements reached on Tuesday came in areas where Mr. Biden said the United States was poised to move aggressively: reducing methane emissions and protecting the world’s forests.
Image
Members of Ocean Rebellion protest outside the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in Scotland on Tuesday.
Members of Ocean Rebellion protest outside the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in Scotland on Tuesday.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from about one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States, as part of a larger climate-focused plan to protect tropical forests and a push to speed up clean technology.
Soon after that announcement, administration officials said that 105 countries had signed the Global Methane Pledge, a commitment to reduce methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, including half of the world’s top 30 methane-emitting countries, and that they expected the list to grow.
Notably absent from those signing on, however, were some major methane polluters, like China, Russia, Australia and India.
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The leaders of more than 100 countries also pledged on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030, agreeing to a sweeping accord aimed at protecting some 85 percent of the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global temperatures.
Millions of acres of forests are being lost to global demand for soy, palm oil, timber and cattle, most notably in Brazil which has seen a surge in deforestation of the Amazon since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019. Brazil is among the signatories of the agreement.
Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has played host and master of ceremonies for the gathering of leaders, called countries to action on forests by invoking a horror movie. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said.
The plan is focused on an effort to reduce the financial incentives to cut down forests, with 12 governments committing $12 billion, and private companies pledging $7 billion, to protect and restore forests.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Tuesday. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said of deforestation.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Tuesday. “Let’s end this great chainsaw massacre,” he said of deforestation.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
But some environmental organizations criticized Tuesday’s agreement, saying it would allow deforestation to continue and noting that similar efforts have failed in the past.
At an event unveiling the methane pledge, Mr. Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a partner in hosting the event, framed the agreement as one of the most effective ways countries around the world could quickly begin fighting the effects of climate change.
Emissions of methane, which is produced from oil and natural gas operations, livestock and landfills, can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term.
Mr. Biden said that the United States was prepared to meet the methane goal and could “probably go beyond that” by 2030.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the oil and natural gas industry, called the E.P.A. proposal “sweeping” and pledged to work with the agency to “help shape a final rule that is effective, feasible and designed to encourage further innovation.”
Before he left Glasgow on Tuesday to return to Washington on a late-evening flight, Mr. Biden hailed progress on multiple fronts from the second day of meetings with heads of state, including initiatives to reduce emissions from agriculture. John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s special envoy on climate change, said he expected new financial commitments to fulfill a long-delayed promise to provide $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries to fight and adapt to global warming.
There were private commitments as well: Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, pledged $2 billion to restore natural habitats and transform food systems to reduce their footprint and make them more sustainable in a warming world.
The pledges on Tuesday offered glimmers of some concrete progress after a pessimistic start, which included repeated warnings that the world was running out of time to solve an existential crisis for humans — along with anger from leaders of developing countries who called on wealthy countries to do more, faster, to reduce the fossil fuel emissions that are warming the planet.
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A coal-fueled power station near Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province.
A coal-fueled power station near Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province.Credit...Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Yet the hardest work at the conference will begin after the top leaders have left for home.
Over the next week and a half, diplomats will have to hammer out rules around international carbon markets and figure out how to deliver on a still-unmet promise from more than a decade ago to deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries pivot away from fossil fuels and prepare for the impact of climate change.
Most critically, vulnerable countries are pressing major emitting nations to agree to increase their climate targets each year in order to keep global temperatures from heading past 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution.
China, ahead of the summit, announced it would peak its emissions “before” 2030 — a target that is essentially the same as the one it issued six years ago. The country’s presence at the Glasgow conference itself has been muted. While China’s top negotiator Xie Zhenhua will be in Glasgow throughout the two-week conference, several diplomats said privately they don’t anticipate major new announcements from the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
At his news conference, when Mr. Biden was asked about China, he was sharp in his critique.
“I think it’s been a big mistake for China” not to show up at the conference, he said. “They’ve lost their ability to influence people around the world.”
Mr. Biden had similarly harsh words for Mr. Putin. “His tundra is burning,” Mr. Biden said. “Literally, his tundra is burning. He has serious climate problems. And he has been mum on his willingness to do anything.”
The criticisms of China from U.S. officials — including Mr. Biden’s national security adviser’s comment that the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter had “an obligation to step up” — drew a lengthy rebuke from China’s foreign ministry and some Chinese media outlets on Tuesday.
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Fighting forest fire in Siberia, Russia, in July.
Fighting forest fire in Siberia, Russia, in July.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
“China sticks to its word, and its actions bear fruit,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the ministry, told reporters in Beijing.
Mr. Wang criticized the United States for having “constantly flipped and flopped and gone backward” on climate change, and said it should do more to support the poorer countries that have been worst hit by the consequences of global warming.
The Global Times, a pugnaciously nationalist Chinese newspaper, went further, warning that the Biden administration’s climate change promises were likely to come to nothing if Republicans regain control of Congress in midterm elections.
“If he is not qualified to lead his own country, how are he and his administration going to ‘lead’ in global climate change action?” the paper said in an editorial.
Mr. Biden said in his news conference that he expected to lead his $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill climate bill through Congress and into law. He said he felt certain a key holdout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, would ultimately vote for the bill.
“I believe that Joe will be there,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll get this done”
He also said he had received thanks from other leaders for bringing the United States back to negotiations after disengagement under former President Donald J. Trump, echoing comments he made at the end of a Group of 20 meeting in Rome on Sunday.
“We showed up,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday, shortly before returning to Washington. “And by showing up, we’ve had a profound impact.”
Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and Brad Plumer in Glasgow, Christopher Buckley in Sydney, Australia, and Ivan Penn in Los Angeles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/world/europe/climate-summit-methane-forests.html
Over 100 global leaders pledge to end deforestation by 2030
November 2, 2021
8:23 AM CDT
Last Updated a minute ago
REUTERS
By Jake Spring and Simon Jessop
Summary
* Some $19 billion pledged to protect and restore forests
* Forests absorb nearly a third of CO2 emissions - WRI
* Activists says indigenous communities are forests best guardians
GLASGOW, Nov 2 (Reuters) - More than 100 global leaders have pledged to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade, underpinned by $19 billion in public and private funds to invest in protecting and restoring forests.
The promise, made in a joint statement issued late on Monday at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, was backed by the leaders of countries including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which collectively account for 85% of the world's forests.
The Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forest and Land Use will cover forests totaling more than 13 million square miles, according to a statement released by the UK prime minister's office on behalf of the leaders.
"We will have a chance to end humanity's long history as nature's conqueror, and instead become its custodian," said British leader Boris Johnson, calling it an unprecedented agreement.
U.S President Joe Biden said a new U.S. plan would "help the world deliver on our shared goal of halting natural forest loss" and restoring at least an additional 200 million hectares of forest and other ecosystems by 2030.
"We're going to work to ensure markets recognize the true economic value of natural carbon sinks and motivate governments, landowners and stakeholders to prioritize conservation," Biden said.
A slew of additional government and private initiatives were launched on Tuesday to help reach that goal, including billions in pledges for indigenous guardians of the forest and sustainable agriculture.
CLIMATE BUFFER
Forests absorb roughly 30% of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the nonprofit World Resources Institute. The forests take the emissions out of the atmosphere and prevent them from warming the climate.
Yet this natural climate buffer is rapidly disappearing. The world lost 258,000 sq km (99,600 sq miles) of forest in 2020, according to WRI's deforestation tracking initiative Global Forest Watch. That is an area larger than the United Kingdom.
Monday's agreement vastly expands a similar commitment made by 40 countries as part of the 2014 New York Declaration of Forests and goes further than ever before in laying out the resources to reach that goal.
Non-government organization Global Witness said it was unclear how governments would be held accountable for meeting the new pledge. National laws banning companies and financial institutions from activities that fuel deforestation are needed, it said in a statement.
Under the agreement, 12 countries including Britain have pledged to provide 8.75 billion pounds ($12 billion) of public funding between 2021 and 2025 to help developing countries, including in efforts to restore degraded land and tackle wildfires.
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A logging truck is pictured among burned trees, felled following last year's Rim fire, near Groveland, California July 30, 2014. Long, heavy logging trucks, swaying with the weight of charred California pines, wind through the forest near Yosemite National Park, part of an effort to clean up from last year's devastating wildfires even as new blazes break out this summer.
To match Feature USA-CALIFORNIA/WILDFIRES-TREES REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENVIRONMENT DISASTER)
At least a further 5.3 billion pounds would be provided by private sector investors.
Brazil signed on to the agreement despite soaring deforestation of the Amazon rainforest under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.
Scientists fear destruction of the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, may push it beyond a point of no return, when it can no longer sustain itself and dries out into savanna. That would release massive amounts of greenhouse gas and be catastrophic for the global climate.
COMMUNITY GUARDIANS
Brazil separately on Monday announced a more aggressive target to end deforestation by 2028.
Gabon, also signed onto the agreement, despite plans to continue logging while using practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Five countries, including the Britain and United States, and a group of global charities on Tuesday also pledged to provide $1.7 billion in financing to support indigenous people's conservation of forests and to strengthen their land rights.
Environmentalists say that indigenous communities are the best protectors of the forest, often against violent encroachment of loggers and land grabbers.
More than 30 financial institutions with more than $8.7 trillion in assets under management also said they would make "best efforts" to eliminate deforestation related to cattle, palm oil, soy and pulp production by 2025.
COP26 aims to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Scientists say forests and so-called nature-based solutions will be vital to reaching that goal.
Woodlands have removed about 760 million tonnes of carbon every year since 2011, offsetting about 8% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement, according to the Biomass Carbon Monitor project backed by data analytics firm Kayrros and French research institutions.
"Our biosphere is really helping bail us out for the time being, but there is no guarantee those processes will continue," said Oliver Phillips, an ecologist at the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds.
($1 = 0.7312 pound)
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/over-100-global-leaders-pledge-end-deforestation-by-2030-2021-11-01/
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Over 100 countries vow to end deforestation at climate talks
AP NEWS
By FRANK JORDANS and JILL LAWLESS
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-business-united-nations-scotland-a96c50c03653ea95139f4cef3b621c70
Earth gets hotter, deadlier during decades of climate talks
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FILE - In this Aug. 17, 2021, file photo, embers light up hillsides as the Dixie Fire burns near Milford in Lassen County, Calif. World leaders have been trying to do something about climate change for 29 years but in that time Earth has gotten much hotter and more dangerous. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
By SETH BORENSTEIN
October 30, 2021
World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.
Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.
When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was “a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really,” said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.
Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: “The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation.”
Onondaga Nation Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, center, actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, far right, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, center right, join participants during the People's Climate March in New York, Sept. 21, 2014. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
Data analyzed by The Associated Press from government figures and scientific reports shows “how much we did lose Earth,” said former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly, who headed the American delegation three decades ago.
That Earth Summit set up the process of international climate negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Paris accord and resumes Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders will try to ramp up efforts to cut carbon pollution.
Back in 1992, it was clear climate change was a problem “with major implications for lives and livelihoods in the future,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the AP this month. “That future is here and we are out of time.”
World leaders have hammered out two agreements to curb climate change. In Kyoto in 1997, a protocol set carbon pollution cuts for developed countries but not poorer nations. That did not go into effect until 2005 because of ratification requirements. In 2015, the Paris agreement made every nation set its own emission goals.
Full Coverage: Climate
https://apnews.com/hub/climate
In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.
The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.
In both cases, the United States, a top-polluting country, helped negotiate the deals but later pulled out of the process when a Republican president took office. The U.S. has since rejoined the Paris agreement.
The yearly global temperature has increased almost 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) since 1992, based on multi-year averaging, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth has warmed more in the last 29 years than in the previous 110. Since 1992, the world has broken the annual global high temperature record eight times.
A chunk of ice floats past the Portage Glacier near Girdwood, Alaska. Evan though the glacier is retreating, it's still a half mile wide and four miles long on June 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
MUCH MORE...
https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-technology-environment-europe-98e55f2c64aa6d3dc76a5fc64f8d4ba2
Exactly 12, listen to the dinosaur - don't choose extinction:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59101218
Talk about not living in ur body or on this planet
La Nina Arrives, Threatening to Stoke Droughts and Roil Markets
California and Brazil may get drier, while the Atlantic hurricane season could see more late-season storms as a result.
By Brian K Sullivan
October 14, 2021, 8:00 AM CDT
Dry land surrounds farmlands along the Pardo River during a drought in Caconde, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on Aug. 24.
Photographer: Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg
A weather-roiling La Nina appears to have emerged across the equatorial Pacific, setting the stage for worsening droughts in California and South America, frigid winters in parts of the U.S. and Japan and greater risks for the world’s already strained energy and food supplies.
The phenomenon—which begins when the atmosphere reacts to a cooler patch of water over the Pacific Ocean—will likely last through at least February, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said Thursday. There is a 57% chance it be a moderate event, like the one that started last year, the center said. While scientists may need months to confirm whether La Nina has definitely returned, all the signs are indicating it’s here.
“Everything you want to see in having a La Nina we are seeing,” Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster at the center, said in an interview. “We are pretty confident La Nina is here.”
Signs have been emerging for months that the pattern was likely forming, marking the world’s second La Nina in a row. La Nina—like its counterpart, El Nino—usually peaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, but its effects can trigger widespread consequences across the globe. Its onset this season could have a powerful impact on agriculture markets relying on South American crops, which could face dryer conditions, as well as palm oil across Indonesia, where there may be increased flooding. Cold and storms tend to favor the U.S.’s Pacific Northwest and northern Plains when La Nina emerges, squeezing regional energy markets.
Due to La Nina, California may see little relief from its ongoing drought, making its wildfire season even worse. The most populous U.S. state usually receives the bulk of its annual water from rain and snow spread between November and April, a pattern La Nina threatens to disrupt by shifting storm tracks north. La Nina will likely spell bad news for farmers in southern Brazil and Argentina as well, where the phenomenon can bring drought, hitting already ravaged production of corn, coffee, and soybeans.
Additionally, the Atlantic hurricane season, which has already produced 20 named storms, could see more ahead because of La Nina. That’s because it tends to disrupt the wind shear that normally rips fall storms apart before they can get too strong. While few late-season storms threaten oil and natural gas production and processing in the Gulf of Mexico, expensive real estate along the U.S. East Coast will be vulnerable.
Related: U.S. Consumers Are Set to Pay Far More for Energy This Winter
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-13/u-s-consumers-will-pay-more-for-energy-this-winter-eia-says
La Nina’s impact on the U.S. Northeast could be trickier to diagnose. Sometimes, a La Nina pattern pulls storms inland, leaving more snow and rain to fall across the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys, bypassing the large cities of the East Coast, L’Heureux said. The emergence of a La Nina pattern often brings chilly weather to the northern parts of the U.S. but milder climates in the south. Last year’s winter was the world’s eighth warmest in 142 years of record keeping, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information.
Forecasters are confident La Nina will persist through the winter because the temperatures deep within the ocean are cooler than normal. By early spring, La Nina will likely fade and the Pacific will return to neutral or near normal state.
Likely, of course, is the key word here. While forecasters are all-but certain La Nina has formed, it’s hard to predict long-term temperatures and precipitation rates, since other weather patterns can interfere with La Nina.
“Climate outlooks have probabilities associated with them because they are never guaranteed,” L’Heureux said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-14/la-nina-2021-arrives-impacting-california-drought-fires-u-s-winter-weather
‘They screwed up our lake’: tar sands pipeline is sucking water from Minnesota watersheds
The Anishinaabe people are rallying to save their lakes and their traditional wild rice harvests
Along the eastern boundary of the White Earth Indian Reservation in north-western Minnesota, Indigenous Anishinaabe wild rice harvesters Jerry and Jim Libby set down a row of wooden pallets into the mud just beyond the dock of Upper Wild Rice Lake. It was a clear day, and tight, lush clumps of green rice heads were visible across the lake’s horizon.
In a typical year, the entrance to this – one of a long necklace of wild rice lakes in northern Minnesota to which the region’s Indigenous people flock every year in the late summer – would be covered in at least two feet of water. But now it is composed of suspended sediment as solid as chocolate pudding, through which the Libbys need to create a makeshift ramp simply to carry their canoe out to the waterline.
Minnesota is weathering an historic drought, but there is another problem beyond the weather: Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline has taken a substantial toll on watersheds in the region, including through a permit to pump five billion gallons of water for construction. In the case of Upper Wild Rice Lake, a road construction contractor named Knife River Construction stuck a pump directly in the lake this past June, sucking out an unknown quantity of water, which locals suspect was related to the use of heavy trucks for the pipeline.
“As far as I’m concerned, Enbridge screwed up our lake, and they’re taking money directly away from our families,” Jerry Libby says. “It makes us feel anguished – this is our staple food, you know.”
The Indigenous-led struggle against Line 3, which seeks to move 930,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen daily from Alberta to a shipping and refinery hub in Superior, Wisconsin, has been the biggest environmental and Indigenous land protection campaign in the US this summer. More than 900 people have been arrested opposing the pipeline, including nearly 70 who were kettled in late August during protests outside Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s residence in Minneapolis.
Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands bitumen. Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company, has announced it will begin sending oil through the pipeline next month.
The processing and combustion of bitumen for the pipeline would release greenhouse gases equivalent to 50 coal plants, according to analysis by the nonprofit Oil Change International, thereby significantly contributing to the global climate crisis. But one of the pipeline’s most immediate impacts is on wild rice harvesters such as the Libbys, for whom the annual harvesting season began in late August and runs through much of September.
Wild rice – known to many Anishinaabe people as “manoomin,” or “the food that grows on water” – is a dense, nutritional grain that grows naturally in the abundant lakes and rivers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Canada. Thousands of Anishinaabe people continue to harvest it with the same traditional methods used for generations, by propelling a canoe or small boat through the rice beds with a long pole.
Indigenous people of the region believe they have a sacred covenant to protect manoomin and numerous other nonhuman beings, without which they would cease to exist as distinct peoples, notes longtime Anishinaabe rice harvester Bob Shimek. “During any kind of ceremony we do here, wild rice is involved,” Shimek says. “It’s kind of like the Anishinaabe soul food.”
Line 3 runs across more than 200 bodies of water, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River and some of the region’s most important wild rice waters, streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. The state Department of Natural Resources permitted Enbridge to draw nearly five billion gallons from these water bodies absent public notice or consultation with the White Earth Indian Reservation.
Christy Dolph, a University of Minnesota research scientist focused on the state’s water resources, notes that the pipeline’s impacts on water and the species that depend on it are numerous. In the course of excavating trenches to lay pipe, Enbridge pumps out any groundwater that still seeps into the trench, inevitably leading water to evaporate.
“These activities have a major impact, especially because these wetlands are already under severe stress from the drought,” she says.
Opponents also fear leaks and spills from the tar sands pipeline, particularly since the thick substance is nearly impossible to clean up.
As with other wetland plant species, wild rice is highly sensitive to fluctuations in water levels, which damage its ability both to grow and reseed. For rice harvesters, low water levels mean they are unable to paddle their canoes out to their usual rice grounds, depriving them of a major source of physical and spiritual sustenance, as well as a significant source of income.
During a typical year, the Libby brothers say, they make up to $9,000 from rice harvesting, which they use for basic necessities like home repairs, school supplies for their grandchildren and vehicle maintenance. But since this year’s harvesting season began in late August, many harvesters have had to resort to unorthodox methods such as trekking through the muddy, dried-out lakes in snow shoes with burlap sacks slung around their shoulders, a technique that yields one-third to one-fourth the amount they could harvest with canoes.
Enbridge disputes the notion that they bear any responsibility for the dry conditions in rice beds near the pipeline route or that the pipeline has a detrimental impact on watersheds. “Line 3’s permit conditions protect the environment during construction, and specifically wild rice,” Enbridge spokersperson Juli Kelner wrote via email. “Enbridge pipelines have coexisted with Minnesota’s most sacred and productive wild rice stands for seven decades.”
In response to a request for comment, a Department of Natural Resources spokesperson wrote that “Minnesota DNR has worked consistently to minimize the impacts of the Line 3 replacement project on wild rice and other Minnesota resources. These efforts date back to our original comments to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) regarding project routing, where we strongly advocated for route alternatives that would minimize crossings in or near wild rice waters.”
The effects of Line 3 construction on wild rice are at the center of a first of its kind lawsuit brought by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in which wild rice is itself the plaintiff. Under a series of treaties that Chippewa Anishinaabe people signed with the US government during the mid-19th century, the lawsuit asserts, wild rice “possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” The suit seeks an injunction against the Department of Natural Resources to void Enbridge’s water permit, though the case may not be decided until after construction is completed.
Beyond the direct effects of the Line 3 pipeline, wild rice faces numerous other threats – including from the climate crisis. According to a 2018 report by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an intertribal agency that seeks to protect Anishinaabe treaty rights, climate change will wreak devastation on virtually all the plant and animal species on which they rely. Wild rice is the most endangered of these species because of its sensitivity to flooding, drought, and disease outbreaks, the report says.
Stopping Line 3 is imperative to fighting the climate crisis, opponents note, because tar sands are one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and because the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure locks in emissions for decades to come. For the past several months, activists have called on the Biden administration to stop the pipeline by directing the Army Corps of Engineers to revoke the permit it granted the project under the Trump administration.
According to Anishinaabe wild rice harvester Angel Stevens, a member of the anti-pipeline Manoomin Camp, the struggle against Line 3 is still going strong despite the project’s imminent completion. “We’re continuing to do everything we can to stop this pipeline,” she says.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/19/tar-sands-pipeline-minnesota-lakes?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
With about 96 percent of old-growth redwoods in California already plundered, it's illegal to touch one today.
https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The U.S. just had its hottest summer on record
This summer beat the previous record set by the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought.
Sept. 9, 2021, 2:05 PM CDT / Updated Sept. 9, 2021, 3:46 PM CDT
By Denise Chow
The United States had its hottest summer on record this year, narrowly edging out the previous milestone that was set 85 years ago during the Dust Bowl.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that the average temperature this summer for the contiguous U.S. was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.6 degrees warmer than the long-term average. The heat record caps off a season full of extremes, with parts of the country experiencing persistent drought, wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, .. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/heat-wave-west-coast-hints-climate-change-scientists-say-rcna1297 .. hurricanes and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.
This summer beat the previous record set in 1936 by a hair, coming in at less than 0.01 degrees warmer than during the Dust Bowl year, when huge portions of the West and Great Plains were parched by severe drought.
Though this year's summer was technically hotter than 1936, the very small gap puts the two years "neck and neck," in what NOAA called a "virtual tie."
NOAA's report spans "meteorological summer," .. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202108 .. which covers June, July and August. During that time, 18.4 percent of the country experienced record-high temperatures, including five states — California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah — that had their warmest summers in recorded history, according to the agency.
"Sixteen additional states had a top-five warmest summer on record. No state ranked below average for the summer season," NOAA officials wrote in the climate report.
In June, the Pacific Northwest suffered through a heat wave .. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/heat-wave-west-coast-hints-climate-change-scientists-say-rcna1297 .. that shattered all-time temperature records in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. More than 35 cities in the western U.S. tied or set heat records during the multiday heat wave, where temperatures soared to up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some places.
Global warming is making heat waves and other extreme weather events both more likely and more severe, and climate scientists have said conditions this summer offer a glimpse of what could become more common in the future.
NOAA's report highlighted other extreme events that plagued the country in August, including devastating floods from Tropical Storm Fred, which hit western North Carolina; Tropical Storm Henri, which soaked parts of the Northeast; and flash flooding that killed at least 22 people in Tennessee.
Hurricane Ida, which battered Louisiana and left a trail of destruction from the Gulf Coast into the Northeast, also drenched huge swaths of the country from late August into September.
"With 35 fatalities accounted for during August, it was the deadliest month for flooding across the U.S. since Hurricane Harvey in 2017," NOAA officials wrote in the report.
Dry conditions in the Western U.S. have also fueled a catastrophic wildfire season. In California, the Dixie Fire became the second largest in the state's history, .. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dixie-fire-grows-second-largest-california-history-n1276305
while the Caldor Fire forced thousands to flee from South Lake Tahoe in late August...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/thousands-forced-flee-lake-tahoe-california-s-caldor-fire-rages-n1278076
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/us-just-hottest-summer-record-rcna1957
Birds are veterans of mass extinction, but humans haven't had practice
Birds have made it through five.
By Jim Williams Special to the Star Tribune
August 24, 2021 — 10:55am
If this climate business is indeed the beginning of the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, as some people say, don't worry about birds. Better to worry about us humans, you and me.
There have been five previous mass extinctions. In total, they wiped away 99% of all species that ever existed. But not birds. (Humans weren't here yet.)
Birds survived all five in one form or another, eventually becoming the birds we see today.
The most recent extinction, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, happened 65 million years ago.
The cause of that was either the infamous asteroid, 6.2 miles in diameter, that whistled down onto the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, or massive flows of lava in Siberia. The latter theory has fewer proponents.
Both created significant long-term changes to land, air and water.
Many people think we're in a new mass extinction, the sixth, said Robert Zink in an e-mail interview. Zink, presently a faculty member at the University of Nebraska, previously taught ornithology at the University of Minnesota.
"People believe it's being caused by us changing the environment faster than plants and animals can adapt, " he said, adding parenthetically that viruses seem to be doing just fine.
"Whether our planet is changing faster than it ever has is tough to know," he told me.
"Twenty-one thousand years ago there was a mile-thick glacier where your house stands. The glacier isn't there anymore, so global climate change isn't new, but it might be a lot faster now because of us,'?" he said.
Modern bird species, like those you see in your yard, stem from that 1% of life that survived all five events. Eventually evolution produced new life forms — dinosaurs, then feathered dinosaurs which led to the 10,000-plus bird species we currently enjoy.
"There is debate about whether most modern birds evolved after the cataclysm or if there were lots of bird species present before the asteroid hit, many of them surviving," Zink said.
We do know that opportunity certainly existed on the outcome side of extinction number five.
It eliminated 80% of the life that had survived or evolved to that point, so opportunities for survivors were massive. Birds would have adapted to fill environmental gaps.
I asked Zink if any extant bird species could be traced back that far.
No one knows, he told me. "It's complicated," he said.
Usually, we expect species with small ranges to go extinct before species with larger ranges, he said. Or, we find that ecological specialists, narrow in food or habitat preferences, are perhaps more vulnerable.
We create vulnerability every time we modify a natural landscape, the landscape to which a bird belongs. We change habitat or eliminate it, leaving birds to do the best they can.
How unreal that we humans on our wristwatch time scale could be agents of change previously measured in geologic terms.
Worry about birds? Birds have survived the previous extinctions. They will survive a sixth if that's what they must do. For birds, it's not their first rodeo. Some species will disappear. Evolution will take advantage.
For us? Well, extinction number six would be our first go-round. Would we do as well as birds? Let's hope we never find out.
Illustration by Phillip Krzeminski via AP
The world's oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis, nicknamed the Wonderchicken, in its original environment. The animal lived just before the asteroid impact that's blamed for killing off many species, most notably the giant dinosaurs.
https://www.startribune.com/humans-haven-t-had-practice-but-birds-are-veterans-of-mass-extinction/600090548/
There you go, stop the pleasure brain drugs (dopamine.. dope is for dopes! ;) u get from consumerism and get better ones..
System change, economy like that of Ecuador!, hit a good sustainable balance..
https://www.jbmackinnon.com/
.. per capita consumption growing faster than pop. growth..
.. more durable goods..
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whatonearth/to-help-fight-climate-change-give-your-shopping-habits-a-makeover-advocates-say-1.6138573
.. green tech, working hours, spread wealth, slow economic growth without economic collapse..
.. stop blaming the consumer, systemic change - also produces better humans!..
Good way to kill appetite for one of my and Spain's favorite dishes
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58311105
".. human activity,"
"Just trying to fit in to this scene.."
Forecasters Warn That Henri Could Be The Worst Storm To Hit The Northeast in 30 Years
August 22, 20217:59 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/22/1030099545/henri-tropical-storm-hurricane-long-island-new-england
Tropical Storm Henri charges toward southern New England
By Jason Samenow and Matthew Cappucci
Today at 11:06 a.m. EDT
Henri weakened slightly from a hurricane to a strong tropical storm Sunday morning, but is expected to be a force as it crosses the coast between eastern Long Island and southeast Massachusetts Sunday by around midday.
According to the National Hurricane Center, the storm is forecast to produce “dangerous” storm surge inundation in coastal areas, “considerable” inland flooding due to heavy rain and damaging winds.
Here’s what to know
Inland flooding could pose the most serious threat, with widespread rainfall of 3 to 6 inches north of Philadelphia and south and west of Hartford, and isolated amounts to 10 inches. Significant flooding has already affected New York City and parts of New Jersey.
The surge, or storm-driven rise in water above normally dry land at the coast, could reach 3 to 5 feet, from Long Island Sound to Nantucket Sound, flooding homes and businesses.
Near and east of where the storm makes landfall, winds could gust to at least 60 mph, downing trees and utility lines and triggering power outages.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/22/hurricane-henri-live-updates/
Central Tennessee inundated with rain, ‘catastrophic’ flooding
Parts of the region saw as much as 18 inches of rain fall in 48 hours.
By Laura Reiley
Yesterday at 5:16 p.m. EDT
Central Tennessee was inundated with rain Saturday, leaving some towns struggling with severe flooding.
“The town of Waverly [about 60 miles west of Nashville] is pretty much underwater,” said Krissy Hurley, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Nashville. “There are no deaths that we have been made aware of, but there are people on their roofs waiting to be rescued and many people trapped in their vehicles.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/tennessee-catastrophic-flooding/
Harrowing North Carolina floods left farm animals stranded, lifted houses off their foundations
Four died and four remain missing after a tropical storm brought torrential rain to the area
By Caroline Anders
Yesterday at 4:23 p.m. EDT
Cynthia Cordle’s daughter burst into the house.
“Y’all better come on,” she said. “We’ve got animals drowning.”
It had been raining for days when Tropical Storm Fred swept through western North Carolina this week, killing at least four people, with four others unaccounted for. The flooding ravaged this swath of Appalachia, destroying roads and bridges, washing cars away and displacing an estimated 500 families.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/21/north-carolina-floods-survivors-appalachia/
Biggest US reservoir declares historic shortage, forcing water cuts across west
Officials issue first-ever declaration of tier 1 shortage at Lake Mead as it falls to lowest level since its creation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/16/lake-mead-drought-reservoir-water-level-cuts?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Officials have declared a dire water shortage at Lake Mead, the US’s largest reservoir, triggering major water cuts in Arizona and other western states. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first-ever declaration of a “tier 1” shortage represents an acknowledgment that after a 20-year drought, the reservoir that impounds the Colorado River at the Hoover Dam has receded to its lowest levels since it was created in the 1930s.
Already, the lake is at about 35% capacity – the white “bathtub ring” that lines its perimeter indicates where the water level once was. The lake’s level is projected to fall even lower by the end of the year, prompting cutbacks in January 2022, the Bureau of Reclamation announced Monday.
Arizona will be hardest hit, losing nearly a fifth of the water it receives from the Colorado River. In Pinal county, farmers and ranchers will see the amount of water they get from the river drop by half next year, and disappear altogether by 2023, when the federal government is projected to enact even more severe cuts. Farmers, who have already had to make some land fallow, will probably have to continue to do so in the coming years and rely increasingly on groundwater.
“What we hoped we would never see is here,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, a deputy commissioner at the Bureau of Reclamation. “At the heart of today’s announcement is also an acknowledgment of the hardship the drought has brought.”
Hoover Dam reservoir sinks to record low, in sign of extreme Western U.S. drought<br>Low water levels due to drought are seen as visitors take photos in the Hoover Dam reservoir of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. June 9, 2021. Picture taken June 9, 2021. REUTERS/Bridget Bennett
Lake Mead: largest US reservoir falls to historic low amid devastating drought
Read more
Household water supplies will remain unaffected, though families are likely to see their water prices tick up.
Nevada will lose 7% of the water it gets from the Colorado River, though residents are unlikely to feel a real change because the state has alternative water sources and has begun to use its supplies more efficiently. Mexico will see its supply reduced by 5%, and California will be unaffected.
“This is a very big deal, because there’s never been a shortage like this over the almost 100-year history,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “The immediate impacts of this will not probably be felt by most people. But it’s a big, giant red flag telling a region that is dependent on Colorado River water that we need to adjust to a drier future.”
Cutbacks and conservation efforts – though crucial – are unlikely to reverse the reservoir’s decline in the near future. When it’s full, Lake Mead’s elevation sits at about 1,221ft above sea level. But by next year, the lake’s level is expected to drop to 1,065ft, below the 1,075ft cutoff that triggers first-tier water reductions. By 2023, federal officials and water experts expect a tier 2 shortage. And when the lake’s level dips to 1,025ft, a tier 3 declaration will trigger supply cuts to cities and tribal lands.
Lake Mead, which was formed after the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, has been declining faster than many experts predicted, amid a devastating drought and intense heatwaves that have resulted in less water trickling down from the Rocky Mountains into the Colorado River. The dam, which provides power to about 1.3m people in Nevada, Arizona and California, has seen its efficiency drop by 25%, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
The Colorado River system overall is now at half its capacity, according to the US interior department. The past 16 years have been the driest period the basin has seen in 1,200 years, the agency reported. Although the west has endured periods of extended drought, the current conditions have been exacerbated by the climate crisis, which is fueling longer and more severe dry spells, scientists have made clear.
Federal officials recognize “the very real possibility that the hydrology that we planned for years ago may not be the worst the basin may see in the future”, Touton said. Additional actions, cutbacks and conservation efforts “will likely be necessary in the very near future”, she explained.
The water level in Lake Powell, the river’s second-largest reservoir, has also been dropping precipitously, threatening to disrupt the roughly 5bn kilowatt hours of electricity generated each year at the Glen Canyon Dam. It is currently at 32% of full capacity.
“I think in the next five years, what we need to do is have a reckoning over our water use,” Porter said. “We have to rethink how we use water in the western US.”
Finding the Will to Stave Off a Darker Future
Aug. 14, 2021
In June 1988 a NASA scientist, Dr. James Hansen, appeared on a very hot day in Washington and told a group of powerful senators that a grim future lay ahead. Carbon emissions, he said, had raised average global temperatures to the highest levels in recorded human history, bringing heat waves, droughts and other disruptions to people’s lives. “The greenhouse effect has been detected,” he said, “and it is changing our climate now.”
That same year a collection of scientists assembled by the United Nations — known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — delivered much the same message, warning pointedly of rising seas and threats to biodiversity. Four years later, world leaders meeting in Rio de Janeiro signed a landmark agreement to stabilize “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
We knew, three decades ago, about global warming and its consequences. We suspected, even then, that the potentially catastrophic future forecast in the I.P.C.C.’s latest report, released on Monday — a report the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, called a “code red for humanity” — could well come to pass.
What have we done with that knowledge? Very little, for lots of reasons. Timid leaders, feckless legislatures. Interminable arguments between rich and poor nations over who bears responsibility. Well-financed disinformation campaigns from big polluters like Exxon Mobil. On a purely human level, there’s the reluctance of people living worry-free in the here and now to make the investments and sacrifices necessary to protect future generations.
All in all, the past 30 years have been a colossal series of missed opportunities. Good ideas squandered. Time lost. The performance of the United States, historically the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (China is now the biggest annual emitter) and therefore presumed leader of any effort to confront the problem, has been particularly disheartening.
President George H.W. Bush, having boldly promised to counter the “greenhouse effect” with what he called “the White House effect,” had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the Rio conference, where he made sure that the treaty signed there had no real teeth. Similarly blinded by fossil fuel interests, and worried that the United States was being asked to carry a disproportionate share of the burden, Congress in 1997 refused to even consider, much less ratify, the agreement worked out by Vice President Al Gore in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce emissions from industrialized nations.
President George W. Bush — who, like his father, talked a good game in his campaign — was no better. Hypnotized by the fossil fuel enthusiasts around him, notably Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney, he repudiated Kyoto altogether, greatly embarrassing his E.P.A. administrator, Christie Whitman, who eventually quit. Even Barack Obama, who understood the issue and appreciated its gravity, but was fatally detached when it came to legislative infighting, fell short. He failed to persuade a Congress controlled by his own party to cap emissions of carbon dioxide.
Mr. Obama partly compensated for this with an admirable suite of regulatory initiatives aimed at reducing emissions from vehicles, oil and gas wells and power plants, which gave John Kerry, then the secretary of state, the credibility he needed to help forge a new global treaty in Paris in 2015. But these initiatives were always vulnerable to repeal, and were unsurprisingly and expeditiously repudiated by President Donald Trump, who seemed to have no idea what climate change was all about and had no interest in learning.
Such is the weight of history that President Biden bears as he faces an opportunity to assert American leadership in advance of a global summit on climate change in Glasgow in November. There, it is hoped that the 190 or so countries in attendance will greatly improve on the commitments they made in Paris to reduce emissions. The Washington Post has called this meeting a “moment of truth’’ for climate change. To anyone who has read the I.P.C.C. report, that is not journalistic hyperbole.
The report’s main points are these: First, nations have waited so long to curb emissions that a hotter future is essentially locked in, as are more droughts, more forest fires, more crippling heat waves, more sea level rise, more floods. The greenhouse gases that have already been pumped into the atmosphere are going to stay there a long time, inflicting misery for years to come.
This summer has already produced huge floods in Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India, blazes in Greece and Siberia, wildfires erasing entire towns in California and Canada, murderous heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, the drying up of Colorado River reservoirs. “What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see?” asked one U.N. climate official. Fair question. But what the numbers show is that these meteorological calamities will become routine unless the world takes dramatic steps to get a grip on emissions.
In their analysis of the new report, the Times reporters Henry Fountain and Brad Plumer offer this illustration. Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century. If global warming rises to around 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next 20 years, heat waves that would have occurred once every 50 years can be expected to show up once every 10 years. At 4 degrees of warming, they’ll show up every year.
Point two: Humanity can still take a stand. It must. If countries make a coordinated effort to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by, say, midcentury, and undertake through reforestation and other means to remove carbon from the air, global warming might level off at around 1.5 degrees. This in turn means mustering the will to stave off a darker future than the one the world has already locked itself into. It also means, in policy terms, a rapid shift away from fossil fuels; big investments in wind, solar and nuclear power; a rebuilt electric grid; more efficient homes and buildings — in short, a wholly different energy delivery system.
Earlier this month, Mr. Biden announced a strategy to shift Americans from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles, thus resurrecting an Obama initiative Mr. Trump had canceled. This is an important step. But Mr. Biden is not going to get the energy transformation he wants via regulation any more than Mr. Obama could. For this, he will need Congress.
Can Congress deliver? No small question. The Senate, split evenly between the parties, took forever to approve an infrastructure bill, which has only modest climate-related measures in it and should not have been all that controversial. Ahead lies something a lot more difficult — winning approval of a giant $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that can be approved with only 51 votes (all the Democrats and the vice president), thus avoiding a Republican filibuster and opening a legislative pathway for a range of big-ticket social programs and Mr. Biden’s climate policies.
Of these, two are of paramount importance and are essential to honoring Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to cut America’s emissions in half by 2030, eliminate fossil fuel emissions from power plants by 2035 and zero out all greenhouse gases by midcentury — pretty much what the I.P.C.C. wants. One is billions in incentives for electric vehicles and for clean energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear power. The other is a clean electricity standard that, as currently envisioned, would reward power producers that reduce emissions and penalize those that don’t. There are likely to be add-ons from individual senators, like Chris Van Hollen’s proposal, unveiled this month, to tax Exxon, Chevron and a handful of other major oil and gas companies to get them to pay for floods, fires and other disasters linked to the fossil fuels they have produced over the years.
How great would it be if the Senate and then the House approved such a package before the climate summit in Glasgow? One person who would shout to the rafters is John Kerry, once again the White House’s point man on international negotiations. He’ll be the face of America’s resolve in Scotland, and he’ll need tangible evidence to prove that Washington cares. Congress can give it to him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opinion/climate-change-summit.html
This Is the World Being Left to Us by Adults
Aug. 19, 2021
By Greta Thunberg, Adriana Calderón, Farzana Faruk Jhumu and Eric Njuguna
The authors are youth climate activists from Sweden, Mexico, Bangladesh and Kenya, working with the international youth-led Fridays For Future movement.
Last week, some of the world’s leading climate change scientists confirmed that humans are making irreversible changes to our planet and extreme weather will only become more severe. This news is a “code red for humanity,” said the United Nations secretary general.
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven’t listened.
On Aug. 20, 2018, one child staged a lone protest outside the Swedish Parliament, expecting to stay for three weeks. Tomorrow we will mark three years since Greta Thunberg’s strike. Even earlier, brave young people from around the world spoke out about the climate crisis in their communities. And today, millions of children and young people have united in a movement with one voice, demanding that decision makers do the work necessary to save our planet from the unprecedented heat waves, massive floods and vast wildfires we are increasingly witnessing. Our protest will not end until the inaction does.
For children and young people, climate change is the single greatest threat to our futures. We are the ones who will have to clean up the mess you adults have made, and we are the ones who are more likely to suffer now. Children are more vulnerable than adults to the dangerous weather events, diseases and other harms caused by climate change, which is why a new analysis released Friday by UNICEF is so important.
The Children’s Climate Risk Index provides the first comprehensive view of where and how this crisis affects children. It ranks countries based on children’s exposure to climate and environmental shocks, as well as their underlying vulnerability to those shocks.
It finds that virtually every child on the planet is exposed to at least one climate or environmental hazard right now. A staggering 850 million, about a third of all the world’s children, are exposed to four or more climate or environmental hazards, including heat waves, cyclones, air pollution, flooding or water scarcity. A billion children, nearly half the children in the world, live in “extremely high risk” countries, the UNICEF researchers report.
This is the world being left to us. But there is still time to change our climate future. Around the world, our movement of young activists continues to grow.
In Bangladesh, Tahsin Uddin, 23, saw the impacts of climate change in his village and other coastal areas and was moved to action. He is passionate about climate education and has created a network of young journalists and educators to spread awareness, all while organizing cleanups of waterways teeming with plastic waste pollution.
In the Philippines, Mitzi Jonelle Tan, 23, has had to complete her homework by candlelight as typhoons raged outside and wiped out her community’s electricity. She told us there were times she was afraid of drowning in her own bedroom as water flooded in. Now she is leading youth in her country to respond to the aftermath of those typhoons and other hazards through sharing food, water, clothes and support with the most affected communities.
In Zimbabwe, Nkosi Nyathi, 18, is worried about a potential food crisis if weather patterns continue. Heat waves made school a challenging experience for him and his peers. Now he speaks to leaders from around the world to demand the inclusion of young people in decisions that affect their future.
The fundamental goal of the adults in any society is to protect their young and do everything they can to leave a better world than the one they inherited. The current generation of adults, and those that came before, are failing at a global scale.
The Children’s Climate Risk Index reveals a disturbing global inequity when it comes to the worst effects of climate change. Thirty-three countries, including the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria and Guinea, are considered extremely high-risk for children, but those countries collectively emit just 9 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The 10 countries with the highest emissions, including China, the United States, Russia and Japan, collectively account for nearly 70 percent of global emissions. And children in those higher-emitting states face lower risks: Only one of these countries, India, is ranked as extremely high-risk in the UNICEF report.
Many higher-risk countries are poorer nations from the global south, and it’s there that people will be most impacted, despite contributing the least to the problem. We will not allow industrialized countries to duck responsibility for the suffering of children in other parts of the world. Governments, industry and the rest of the international community must work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as 195 nations committed to do in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.
We have less than 100 days until the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow. The world’s climate scientists have made it clear that the time is now — we must act urgently to avoid the worst possible consequences. The world’s young people stand with the scientists and will continue to sound the alarm.
We are in a crisis of crises. A pollution crisis. A climate crisis. A children’s rights crisis. We will not allow the world to look away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/climate-un-report-greta-thunberg.html
Rain fell at the normally snowy summit of Greenland for the first time on record
By Rachel Ramirez, CNN
Updated 3:27 PM ET, Thu August 19, 2021
Melt water runs across the Greenland ice sheet.
(CNN) - For the first time on record, precipitation on Saturday at the summit of Greenland — roughly two miles above sea level — fell as rain and not snow.
Temperatures at the Greenland summit over the weekend rose above freezing for the third time in less than a decade. The warm air fueled an extreme rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall in Washington, DC, nearly 250,000 times.
It was the heaviest rainfall on the ice sheet since record keeping began in 1950, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the amount of ice mass lost on Sunday was seven times higher than normal for this time of year.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said this is evidence Greenland is warming rapidly.
"What is going on is not simply a warm decade or two in a wandering climate pattern," Scambos told CNN. "This is unprecedented."
The National Science Foundation's Summit Station is located at the highest point on the Greenland ice sheet, where scientists can observe Arctic weather and changes in the ice. The station has been staffed year-round to observe extreme changes since 1989. The majority of Sunday's rain fell from the southeast coast of Greenland up to the Summit Station.
Jennifer Mercer, program officer for the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation, said because of the significant rain event, operations at the Summit Station would need to change: "It means that we need to consider weather events that we have not had to deal with before in the history of our operations there," she told CNN.
"Increasing weather events including melting, high winds, and now rain, over the last 10 years have occurred outside the range of what is considered normal," Mercer said. "And these seem to be occurring more and more."
As human-caused climate change warms the planet, ice loss has rapidly increased. A major UN climate report released this month concluded that the burning of fossil fuels led to Greenland melting over the past two decades. A recent study published in the journal Cryosphere found Earth has lost a staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice since the mid-1990s, a large portion of which was from the Arctic, including the Greenland ice sheet.
In July, the Greenland ice sheet experienced one of the most significant melting events in the past decade, losing more than 8.5 billion tons of surface mass in a single day, which was enough to submerge Florida in two inches of water. It was the third instance of extreme melting in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s.
In 2019, Greenland shed roughly 532 billion tons of ice into the sea. During that year, an unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire ice sheet's surface to begin melting. Global sea level rose permanently by 1.5 millimeters as a result.
------
Key takeaways from the UN report on the climate crisis
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/world/ipcc-climate-key-takeaways/index.html
"We are crossing thresholds not seen in millennia, and frankly this is not going to change until we adjust what we're doing to the air," said Scambos.
Other unusual events have become more frequent, too, Mercer said.
Two years ago, a polar bear made it to the Summit Station, which was unusual since polar bears live in coastal regions where they can easily find food. The bear had trekked several hundred miles inland across the ice sheet. In the last five years, Mercer said three polar bears have been sighted high on Greenland's ice sheet.
According to Mercer, the rain will have a lasting effect on the properties of the snow, leaving a crust behind that will absorb more energy from the sun, until it gets buried by snow. Scambos said this crusty layer will also be a barrier that prevents the downward draining of melt water, which will then flood the surface of the ice sheet and initiate run off at higher elevations.
Sunday's rainfall event "will be visible in ice core records in the future," Mercer said.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/19/weather/greenland-summit-rain-climate-change/index.html
The Pacific Northwest, Built for Mild Summers, Is Scorching Yet Again
By Mike Baker and Sergio Olmos
Aug. 13, 2021
SEATTLE — Road crews sprayed water on century-old bridges in Seattle on Thursday to keep the steel from expanding in the sizzling heat. In Portland, Ore., where heat has already killed dozens of people this summer, volunteers delivered water door to door. Restaurants and even some ice cream shops decided it was too hot to open.
For the second time this summer, a part of the country known for its snow-capped mountains and fleece-clad inhabitants was enduring a heat wave so intense that it threatened lives and critical infrastructure. The region’s latest round of sweltering temperatures further exposed how communities built for the mild summers of decades past are grossly unprepared for the extreme heat stoked by a warming climate.
The previous heat wave, which baked the Pacific Northwest in late June, shattered temperature records. This week’s weather has not quite reached those same levels, but the heat was still jarring by historical standards: Portland averages about one 100-degree day a year. Wednesday and Thursday brought the total up to five days in 2021. Temperatures on Friday fell just short of 100 with a high, according to the National Weather Service, of 95. Seattle hit a high of 90.
Image
Seattle has had as many 100-degree days this summer as it did all of the previous century.Credit...Amanda Snyder/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press
In Seattle, which has recorded three 100-degree days this summer — as many as it did in the entire century before — officials are once again encouraging people to visit libraries and community centers to stay cool. But not all of them are available to help, because most of the city’s community centers and some of the libraries don’t have air conditioning, something the city is looking to change in the coming years.
“It’s a stunning shift, even in government,” said Stephanie Formas, the chief of staff to Mayor Jenny Durkan. “We have to fundamentally shift how we think about infrastructure here — roads, homes, office buildings.”
It is not just a matter of comfort. The region is still tallying a death toll from the June heat wave, and mortality data analyzed by The New York Times shows that about 600 more people died in Washington and Oregon during that week than would have been typical.
Officials in Portland’s Multnomah County pointed to a lack of air conditioning in homes as a key factor in deaths. Unlike large swaths of the country where air conditioning is now standard, many in the Pacific Northwest live without such relief. Just 44 percent of residents in Seattle reported having some sort of air conditioning in 2019, although those numbers have been on the rise, with installers struggling to keep up with demand.
Image
A cooling shelter in Portland on Wednesday. A late June heat wave, which sent temperatures in the city to a high of 116 degrees, would almost certainly not have occurred without global warming, researchers found.Credit...Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Reuters
Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon declared a state of emergency heading into this week’s heat wave, and Portland’s emergency management department has mobilized 2,000 volunteers, trained to respond to natural disasters, to help manage cooling centers and misting stations and to deliver water to people who might need it. In some cases, they are going door to door.
Officials are encouraging people to check on their neighbors, especially those who are elderly or living on the streets.
Along with more immediate efforts, emergency planners are discussing longer-term strategies, said Dan Douthit, a spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management. Does the area need to require air conditioning in buildings? Does the city need to establish dedicated cooling centers?
The June heat wave, which sent temperatures in Portland to a record high of 116 degrees, would almost certainly not have occurred without global warming, an international team of researchers has said. A major United Nations report this week found that warming will intensify across the planet over the next three decades because nations have delayed curbing fossil-fuel emissions for so long.
The warming particularly threatens residents of low-income neighborhoods. During the last heat wave, Vivek Shandas, a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University, went to the poorest parts of the city with a calibrated thermometer and got a reading of 121 degrees, five degrees higher than the official high for the day, recorded at the airport.
Now officials have asked Dr. Shandas to perform an official study on heat pockets across the city; a team of volunteer researchers planned to take temperature readings of East Portland, with less shade cover and green spaces, and produce a report on their findings.
“We’re seeing a big shift from managers, municipal agencies that want to get out in front of these things, because they are hearing the fatalities we had during the last heat wave were preventable,” Dr. Shandas said.
Image
Vivek Shandas, a professor at Portland State University, recording temperatures in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods on Thursday. One reading on the pavement reached 121 degrees.Credit...Tojo Andrianarivo for The New York Times
As heat peaked across the region, its transportation infrastructure was also straining again. Portland’s light-rail system, designed for the usual temperature ranges of the local climate, began slowing some of its lines, so that operators could keep an eye out for components that might be damaged in the heat. In June, the Portland Streetcar had to shut down during the heat wave, which melted part of a cable.
Washington State has also dealt with transportation disruptions. The metal draw bridges that link Seattle’s historic neighborhoods need cold showers to keep them operating. In June, concrete buckled on parts of Interstate 5 and on sidewalks in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. Some local officials are now reassessing the materials used in road projects.
“We are looking at some different methods used in hotter areas of the country that are more used to this kind of extreme heat,” said James Parker, the county’s road maintenance director. “We can’t just assume this is an isolated incident. Things are trending hotter.”
Image
Construction at a Seattle light rail station. Roads and bridges in the region have been stressed by this summer’s extreme heat.Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
The eastern parts of Washington and Oregon are more used to hot summer temperatures, but they have also struggled to manage the heat. In June, the utility Avista, which serves parts of Washington, Idaho and Oregon, couldn’t keep up with demand as air-conditioning units strained the grid. Thousands of customers endured rolling blackouts.
Avista is now examining how to account for longer and more intense heat waves and planning capacity upgrades in some areas.
The heat has also damaged crops, left salmon scarred with white fungus, worsened wildfire conditions and exacerbated the historic drought in the West, where wells are running dry and some farmers have been cut off from irrigation water.
In Portland on Thursday, many restaurants closed their doors. One ice cream shop announced that it wouldn’t open until Saturday, worried about customers who might faint in line.
At a different shop, Fifty Licks Ice Cream, the owner, Chad Draizin, closed during the heat in June. He said he would do so again if temperatures got to 110 degrees, worried about customers and employees — and whether his shop’s equipment could even handle those conditions.
“Eventually,” he said, “the ice cream just melts.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/us/excessive-heat-warning-seattle-portland.html?searchResultPosition=2
Global sizzling: July was hottest month on record, NOAA says
By SETH BORENSTEIN yesterday
This image made available by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows temperature differences from average values in July 2021 around the world.
On Friday, Aug. 13, 2021, U.S. weather officials said Earth in July was the hottest month ever recorded. (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information via AP)
Earth sizzled in July and became the hottest month in 142 years of recordkeeping, U.S. weather officials announced.
As extreme heat waves struck parts of the United States and Europe, the globe averaged 62.07 degrees (16.73 degrees Celsius) last month, beating out the previous record set in July 2016 and tied again in 2019 and 2020.
"It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record"
https://www.noaa.gov/news/its-official-july-2021-was-earths-hottest-month-on-record
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. The margin was just .02 degrees (.01 Celsius),
The last seven Julys, from 2015 to 2021, have been the hottest seven Julys on record, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. Last month was 1.67 degrees (0.93 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average for the month.
“In this case first place is the worst place to be,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”
“This is climate change,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. “It is an exclamation mark on a summer of unprecedented heat, drought, wildfires and flooding.”
Earlier this week, a prestigious United Nations science panel warned of worsening climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and other human activity.
https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-latin-america-middle-east-africa-europe-1d89d5183583718ad4ad311fa2ee7d83
Warming on land in western North America and in parts of Europe and Asia really drove the record-setting heat, Sanchez-Lugo said. While the worldwide temperature was barely higher than the record, what shattered it was land temperature over the Northern Hemisphere, she said.
Northern Hemisphere temperatures were a third of a degree (.19 degrees Celsius) higher than the previous record set in July 2012, which for temperature records is “a wide margin,” Sanchez-Lugo said.
July is the hottest month of the year for the globe, so this is also the hottest month on record.
One factor helping the world bake this summer is a natural weather cycle called the Arctic Oscillation, sort of a cousin to El Nino, which in its positive phase is associated with more warming, the NOAA climatologist said.
Even with a scorching July and a nasty June, this year so far is only the sixth warmest on record. That’s mostly because 2021 started cooler than recent years due to a La Nina cooling of the central Pacific that often reduces the global temperature average, Sanchez-Lugo said.
“One month by itself does not say much, but that this was a La Nina year and we still had the warmest temperatures on record ... fits with the pattern of what we have been seeing for most of the last decade now,” said University of Illinois meteorology professor Donald Wuebbles.
While the world set a record in July, the United States only tied for its 13th hottest July on record. Even though California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington had their hottest Julys, slightly cooler than normal months in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire kept the nation from approaching record heat levels.
The last time the globe had a July cooler than the 20th century average was in 1976, which was also the last year the globe was cooler than that normal.
“So if you’re younger than 45 you haven’t seen a year (or July) where the mean temperature of the planet was cooler than the 20th century average,” said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi.
https://apnews.com/article/science-environment-and-nature-climate-change-f6cb3a4f7c2ecdb333a4f0fcfb1025f8
Bill Gates Pledges $1.5 Billion for Infrastructure Bill’s New Climate Projects
A Gates-backed venture would apply for matching funds from an Energy Department program that embraces industrial policy
WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
02:48
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-pledges-1-5-billion-for-infrastructure-bills-new-climate-projects-11628769601
Bill Gates’s investment fund will pledge $1.5 billion for climate projects if Congress enacts an infrastructure bill. The Microsoft co-founder and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told the WSJ how public-private partnerships can spur innovation. Photo: Gates Ventures
By Timothy Puko
Updated Aug. 12, 2021 9:24 am ET
Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates said his climate investment fund will commit $1.5 billion for joint projects with the U.S. government if Congress enacts a program aimed at developing technologies that lower carbon emissions.
A roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the Senate this week .. https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-set-to-pass-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-tuesday-11628597274?mod=article_inline .. would give the Energy Department $25 billion for demonstration projects funded through public-private partnerships, part of more than $100 billion to address climate change. The House hasn’t yet approved the legislation.
Mr. Gates, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, said a fund run by his Breakthrough Energy could spend the money over three years on projects aimed at slowing the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-interview-climate-change-book-11613173337?mod=article_inline
https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-climate-change-effects-may-be-irreversible-u-n-panel-report-says-11628496000?mod=article_inline
The Breakthrough projects, which would have to compete with other applicants for the funds, could include emissions-free fuel for planes and technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
“Critical for all these climate technologies is to get the costs down and to be able to scale them up to a pretty gigantic level,” Mr. Gates said. “You’ll never get that scale up unless the government’s coming in with the right policies, and the right policy is exactly what’s in that infrastructure bill.”
TO READ THE FULL STORY
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-pledges-1-5-billion-for-infrastructure-bills-new-climate-projects-11628769601
U.N. sounds 'deafening' warning on climate change
Nina ChestneyAndrea Januta
August 9, 2021
7:09 AM CDT
Last Updated an hour ago
Summary
Human activities 'unequivocally' causing climate change
World is likely to hit 1.5C warming limit within 20 years
Aug 9 (Reuters) - The United Nations panel on climate change told the world on Monday that global warming was dangerously close to being out of control – and that humans were "unequivocally" to blame.
Already, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned.
Also read: Key takeaways from the U.N. climate panel's report
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/what-they-said-about-code-red-un-climate-science-report-2021-08-09/
In other words, the deadly heat waves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a "code red for humanity".
Also read: What they said about 'Code Red' U.N. climate science report
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/what-they-said-about-code-red-un-climate-science-report-2021-08-09/
"The alarm bells are deafening," he said in a statement. "This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet." read more
In three months' time, the U.N. COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, will try to wring much more ambitious climate action out of the nations of the world, and the money to go with it.
Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific studies, the IPCC report gives the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of how climate change is altering the natural world -- and what could still be ahead.
Unless immediate, rapid and large-scale action is taken to reduce emissions, the report says, the average global temperature is likely to reach or cross the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold within 20 years.
The pledges to cut emissions made so far are nowhere near enough to start reducing level of greenhouse gases - mostly carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels - accumulated in the atmosphere.
'WAKE-UP CALL'
Governments and campaigners reacted to the findings with alarm.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/what-they-said-about-code-red-un-climate-science-report-2021-08-09/
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he hoped the report would be "a wake-up call for the world to take action now, before we meet in Glasgow".
The report says emissions "unequivocally caused by human activities" have already pushed the average global temperature up 1.1C from its pre-industrial average -- and would have raised it 0.5C further without the tempering effect of pollution in the atmosphere.
That means that, even as societies move away from fossil fuels, temperatures will be pushed up again by the loss of the airborne pollutants that come with them and currently reflect away some of the sun's heat.
A rise of 1.5C is generally seen as the most that humanity could cope with without suffering widespread economic and social upheaval.
The 1.1C warming already recorded has been enough to unleash disastrous weather. .. https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-2020/WARMING/qzjpqdadnvx/
This year, heat waves killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and smashed records around the world. Wildfires fuelled by heat and drought are sweeping away entire towns in the U.S. West, releasing record carbon dioxide emissions from Siberian forests, and driving Greeks to flee their homes by ferry.
Further warming could mean that in some places, people could die just from going outside.
"The more we push the climate system ... the greater the odds we cross thresholds that we can only poorly project," said IPCC co-author Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
IRREVERSIBLE
Some changes are already "locked in". Greenland’s sheet of land-ice is "virtually certain" to continue melting, and raising the sea level, which will continue to rise for centuries to come as the oceans warm and expand.
“We are now committed to some aspects of climate change, some of which are irreversible for hundreds to thousands of years,” said IPCC co-author Tamsin Edwards, a climate scientist at King’s College London. “But the more we limit warming, the more we can avoid or slow down those changes.”
But even to slow climate change, the report says, the world is running out of time.
If emissions are slashed in the next decade, average temperatures could still be up 1.5C by 2040 and possibly 1.6C by 2060 before stabilising.
And if, instead the world continues on its the current trajectory, the rise could be 2.0C by 2060 and 2.7C by the century’s end.
The Earth has not been that warm since the Pliocene Epoch roughly 3 million years ago -- when humanity's first ancestors were appearing, and the oceans were 25 metres (82 feet) higher than they are today.
It could get even worse, if warming triggers feedback loops that release even more climate-warming carbon emissions -- such as the melting of Arctic permafrost or the dieback of global forests.
Under these high-emissions scenarios, Earth could broil at temperatures 4.4C above the preindustrial average by the last two decades of this century.
Reporting by Nina Chestney in London and Andrea Januta in Guerneville, California; Additional reporting by Jake Spring in Brasilia, Valerie Volcovici in Washington, and Emma Farge in Geneva; Editing by Katy Daigle, Lisa Shumaker and Kevin Liffey
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/un-sounds-clarion-call-over-irreversible-climate-impacts-by-humans-2021-08-09/
THanks to BOREALIS for posting.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=165344987
Scorched, Parched and Now Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country
Sunscreen on grapes. Toilet water that is treated and used for irrigation. Napa Valley winemakers are taking extreme steps in the face of climate change.
1d ago
By CHRISTOPHER FLAVELLE
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/18/climate/napa-wine-heat-hot-weather.html
See How Wildfire Smoke Spread Across America
By Nadja Popovich and Josh KatzJuly 21, 2021
Wildfire smoke from Canada and the Western United States stretched across the continent this week, covering skies in a thick haze and triggering health alerts from Toronto to Philadelphia. Air quality remained in the unhealthy range across much of the East Coast on Wednesday morning as the haze pushed southward.
In recent weeks, a series of near-relentless heat waves and deepening drought linked to climate change have helped to fuel exploding wildfires. In southern Oregon, the Bootleg Fire grew so large and hot that it created its own weather, triggering lightning and releasing enormous amounts of smoke. But more than 80 large fires are currently burning across 13 American states, and many more are active across Canada.
Now, the effects are being felt thousands of miles from the flames.
As the smoke moved eastward across Toronto, New York and Philadelphia on Tuesday, concentrations of dangerous microscopic air pollution known as PM2.5 (because the particles are less than 2.5 microns in diameter) reached highs in the “unhealthy” range for most of the day. Minnesota was heavily blanketed by smoke from wildfires burning across the Canadian border, with the city of Brainerd and others recording “hazardous” levels of pollution, the highest designation of concern from the Environmental Protection Agency.
[Daily updates: See the latest news on extreme weather and the climate crisis.]
From Minnesota to Manhattan, the sun appeared orange because of haze from wildfire smoke.
Bjoern Kils/Reuters
“What we’re seeing here today is the convergence of several smoke plumes,” said Nancy French, a wildfire scientist at Michigan Technological University, noting that much of the United States was experiencing some amount of haze, even as the highest surface pollution swept across the Midwest and Northeast.
On Tuesday, eerie orange sunsets were coupled with scratchy throats and watering eyes for many people across the two regions.
Fine particulate matter, which is released during wildfires (and also through the burning of fossil fuels), is dangerous to human health. Breathing high concentrations of PM2.5 can increase the risk of asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes.
The map above, based on modeling from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows how smoke from fires burning in the West and central Canada traveled across the country to reach the East Coast. The map reflects fine particulate pollution released by the fires and does not include pollution from other human sources of PM2.5, like power plants, industry and cars.
It’s not unprecedented to see smoke travel such long distances, said Róisín Commane, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, but it doesn’t always descend to the surface.
Dr. Commane said people should avoid going outdoors in high-pollution conditions, and especially avoid strenuous exercise. She also suggested that wearing filtered masks can provide protection for those who can’t avoid the outdoors.
“A lot of the masks people have been wearing for Covid are designed to capture PM2.5,” she said, referring to N95-style masks. “That’s the right size to be very useful for air quality.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/21/climate/wildfire-smoke-map.html
You can definitely smell it in the air here.
A couple whose 2020 gender reveal party allegedly sparked a deadly wildfire in California has been charged in the death of a firefighter
By Alexandra Meeks and Hollie Silverman, CNN
Updated 3:57 AM ET, Wed July 21, 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/us/gender-reveal-el-dorado-wildfire-charges/index.html
(CNN)A Southern California couple whose gender reveal party allegedly sparked the deadly El Dorado wildfire in 2020 has been charged with 30 crimes, including involuntary manslaughter, authorities announced Tuesday.
A smoke bomb set off by the couple in Yucaipa, California, on September 5 as part of a gender reveal sparked a fire that went on to burn more than 22,000 acres across two counties, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson said during a news conference.
One firefighter was killed while battling the flames and two others were injured, according to Anderson. The fire destroyed several homes and burned more than 22,000 acres, his office said.
Cal Fire determined the cause of the fire was a "smoke-generating pyrotechnic device."
Crap. Ballywallicock now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-57875732
It has been a remarkably warm day for Northern Ireland.
But breaking temperature records is no longer a remarkable event, it is the reality of life on a warming planet.
In the northern hemisphere summer of 2019, more than 400 individual temperature records were broken.
Globally, 19 of the warmest 20 years on record have occurred since the year 2000.
And extreme summer heat can make torrential summer downpours more intense, bringing the destructive flooding that we've seen in Germany and Belgium this week.
That was great Bull, liked the language.
It will surely take a revolution in consciousness to
Turn this super tanker around
And on a dime according to many scientists
Although, a technicality; the pope did use guilt on those Predators.
;).
No guilt here.
Pope launches green initiative, decrying "predatory attitude" toward planet
Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY, May 25 (Reuters) - Pope Francis launched an initiative on Tuesday to make Catholic institutions ranging from families to universities to businesses environmentally sustainable in seven years, saying a "predatory attitude" toward the planet must end.
The Laudato Si Action Platform takes its name from the pope's landmark 2015 encyclical on the need to protect the environment, reduce wasteful lifestyles, stem global warming and protect the poor from the effects of climate change.
At a news conference announcing the initiative, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican's development office, said the pope has been invited to attend the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November in Glasgow, Scotland. Turkson indicated that the pope likely will attend.
In a video message for the launch, the pope said the initiative would be "a seven-year journey that will see our communities committed in different ways to becoming totally sustainable, in the spirit of integral ecology".
He decried "our predatory attitude, which makes us feel that we are masters of the planet and its resources, and authorises us to make irresponsible use of the goods God has given us."
The initiative will have focus groups including families, parishes and diocese, schools and universities, hospitals and other health care facilities, businesses, lay Catholic organisations, and orders of priests and nuns.
Since Laudato Si (Praised Be) was published in 2015, the Vatican and Catholic groups in the 1.3-billion-member Church around the world have taken many initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint.
The Vatican, the world's smallest state, has nearly eliminated single-use plastic, recycles most of its trash and makes its own compost for its gardens.
The Vatican development office will coordinate actions and provide guidance to groups and individuals.
Francis strongly supports the goals of the 2015 U.N. Paris accord to reduce global warming.
"These wounds (to the planet) manifest themselves dramatically in an ecological crisis without precedent, which affects the ground, the air, water and, in general, the ecosystem in which human beings live," Francis said.
"We have a great responsibility, especially with regard to the future generations. What world do we want to leave to our children and our young? Our selfishness, our indifference and our irresponsible ways are threatening the future of our children."
Reporting by Philip Pullella Editing by Mark Heinrich
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/pope-launches-green-initiative-decrying-predatory-attitude-toward-planet-2021-05-25/
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
LAUDATO SI’
OF THE HOLY FATHER
FRANCIS
ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
“Our politics co-evolved with a century of fossil fuels, and so a huge portion of our regulations still favor the incumbent, which is fossil fuels,”
Hey Bull, one striking point made in the vid below is how "personal responsibility" was an actual thing - a manipulation. A deflection.
Nothing like tapping into that old Catholic Guilt.
I forget the stats but industry far surpasses (collective)individual
Behaviors and the 1% have a huge task ahead (over 50 fold) when measuring individual carbon footprints - or in accounting one might say reconcilin' da books.
Fox’s New Channel Changes the Climate for Weather TV
As viewers tune out cable news, Rupert Murdoch is preparing the debut of Fox Weather, a potentially powerful new player in a sphere long dominated by the Weather Channel.
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/media/fox-weather-channel-plus.html
This should be fun. Imagine Tucker Carlson reporting the weather.
The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake
By DAN EGAN
JULY 7, 2021
Photographs By
LYNDON FRENCH
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/07/climate/chicago-river-lake-michigan.html
Climate change in action
Climate change has plunged the Western U.S. into its worst drought in two decades. And a record-breaking heat wave only made things worse.
In Arizona and Nevada, it’s been so hot that doctors warned people they could get third-degree burns from the asphalt. Wildfires raged in Montana and Utah. Power grids in Texas strained as officials asked residents to limit appliance use to avoid blackouts.
The levels in Lake Mead, which supplies water for millions of people, are at their lowest since the 1930s. In one California lake, the water was so shallow that officials spotted plane wreckage from a 1986 crash.
And that’s just in the U.S. Experts say global temperatures will keep rising as countries — and companies — fail to limit their planet-warming emissions. Smaller countries often pay the price for wealthier nations’ pollution through extreme weather. “Most of these gases have come from the United States, China, the European Union, Russia and other developed countries,” Bernard Ferguson writes. Yet islands like the Bahamas, where Ferguson is from, “are on the front lines of the climate crisis.”
The problems in the West and around the globe are more evidence that climate change is already affecting us. But there are also reasons for hope.
What are the solutions?
For The Times Magazine’s climate issue, Ezra Klein spoke with experts to compare political progress in the U.S. with the scale of the crisis. “Our politics co-evolved with a century of fossil fuels, and so a huge portion of our regulations still favor the incumbent, which is fossil fuels,” Saul Griffith, a scientist and founder of a nonprofit, said.
In Australia, Griffith said, a kilowatt-hour of energy generated by rooftop solar panels costs about a third of what it would from a U.S. power grid. “We can make everyone’s energy future cheaper, but politics has to work with technology, which has to work with finance,” he said.
Cities have been adapting in other ways: Tucson, Ariz., is a national leader in recycling wastewater for irrigation and firefighting. Districts in California are investing billions into infrastructure to store water for future droughts.
More globally, another story in the magazine, by Aurora Almendral, focuses on decreasing the shipping trade’s carbon footprint. Cargo vessels are among the largest machines on the planet, and shipping generates 2.9 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions — nearly as much as the entirety of South America. Some experts believe using wind through modern sails could considerably reduce that number.
Other companies are developing more environmentally friendly manufacturing techniques that would repurpose carbon dioxide into building materials, fuels, plastics and even fish food.
“You might wake in the morning on a mattress made from recycled CO2,” Jon Gertner writes. “You might drive your car — with parts made from smokestack CO2 — over roads made from CO2-cured concrete. And at day’s end, you might sip carbontech vodka while making dinner with food grown in a greenhouse enriched by recycled CO2.”
For more: When wildfires blaze across the West, the focus is often on the immediate devastation. But the harm they cause to water supplies can linger for years.
In Opinion: “The way we manage our water is outdated, inefficient, uncoordinated and to a lot of people, unfair,” The Times columnist Farhad Manjoo writes.
Highlights From the ‘Ring of Fire’ Solar Eclipse at Sunrise
Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/solar-eclipse-ring-of-fire.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage
Annals of a Warming Planet
The Particular Psychology of Destroying a Planet
What kind of thinking goes into engaging in planetary sabotage?
By Bill McKibben
May 19, 2021
Smoke billows from a large oil refinery against an orange sunset.
ExxonMobil, the owner of this Louisiana oil refinery, has adopted a tobacco-industry strategy to protect its business model.Photograph by Barry Lewis / Getty
Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
Two weeks ago, I looked at the question of the anxiety that the climate crisis is causing our psyches. But, if you think about it, there’s an equally interesting question regarding the human mind: How is it that some people, or corporations, can knowingly perpetuate the damage? Or, as people routinely ask me, “Don’t they have grandchildren?”
A reminder that plenty of people have been engaged in this kind of planetary sabotage came last week in a remarkable paper by Harvard’s Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes. After analyzing nearly two hundred sources, including some internal company documents and “advertorials,” they concluded that Exxon officials had embraced a strategy “that downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.” And the authors found a model: “These patterns mimic the tobacco industry’s documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations—which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms—and onto consumers. This historical parallel foreshadows the fossil fuel industry’s use of demand-as-blame arguments to oppose litigation, regulation, and activism.” As Supran explains in a long Twitter thread about the research, “ExxonMobil tapped into America’s uniquely individualist culture and brought it to bear on climate change.”
What kind of thinking goes into adopting a tobacco-industry strategy to protect a business model as you wreck the climate system? (And it’s not just Exxon—here’s an analysis of how Big Meat is playing the same climate tricks.) No one, of course, can peer inside the heads of oil-company executives or those of their enablers in the legal, financial, and political worlds. But there’s an interesting explanation in a new book from the British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe. “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis” states its argument in its subtitle: “Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare.” Weintrobe writes that people’s psyches are divided into caring and uncaring parts, and the conflict between them “is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major religions.” The uncaring part wants to put ourselves first; it’s the narcissistic corners of the brain that persuade each of us that we are uniquely important and deserving, and make us want to except ourselves from the rules that society or morality set so that we can have what we want. “Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner exception in check,” she notes, but, troublingly, “ours is the Golden Age of Exceptionalism.” Neoliberalism—especially the ideas of people such as Ayn Rand, enshrined in public policy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—“crossed a Rubicon in the 1980s” and neoliberals “have been steadily consolidating their power ever since.” Weintrobe calls leaders who exempt themselves in these ways “exceptions” and says that, as they “drove globalization forwards in the 1980s,” they were captivated by an ideology that whispered, “Cut regulation, cut ties to reality and cut concern.” Donald Trump was the logical end of this way of thinking, a man so self-centered that he interpreted all problems, even a global pandemic, as attempts to undo him. “The self-assured neoliberal imagination has increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it causes,” she writes.
In her conclusion, Weintrobe contrasts this narcissistic entitlement with the “lively” (and psychologically appropriate) entitlement of young people who are now demanding climate action so that they will have a planet on which to live full lives. “They, who will have to live in a damaged world, need our support to stop further damage,” she writes. “The danger is that unless we break with Exceptionalism and mourn our exaggerated sense of narcissistic entitlement, we may pay them lip service with kind words but throw them overboard . . . while we carry on with carbon-intensive life as usual.”
Passing the Mic
The film “The Ants and the Grasshopper” has been a long time in the making. In 2012, Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas, went to Malawi with a film crew to follow the farmer and activist Anita Chitaya and document her work in ending hunger and gender inequality. “We wanted to show that the biggest innovations in the food system were being driven by frontline communities and people of color in the global South,” Patel said. But, “when Anita learned about climate change, and the role of the United States in furthering it, she was shocked. She asked whether she should come over to America, to school us on what climate change was doing to her community. We fund-raised, travelled in 2017, and documented the impact she had on communities from Iowa to Detroit to Oakland to Washington, D.C.”
The film about that trip—charming, infuriating, big-hearted—will début later this month at the Mountainfilm documentary festival, in Telluride, Colorado. You can watch the trailer here, and it’s worth doing to get a sense of Chitaya’s voice so that you can imagine her answering these questions, which Patel and his team forwarded to her in Africa. (They translated the answers from her native Tumbuka, and the interview has been edited.)
What message were you most trying to get across to Americans when you travelled here?
The atmosphere has been damaged because of gas and smoke coming from America. We came to spread the news about how climate change affects us in Malawi, and what we are doing to change how we live to address the problems. We needed to tell them about the struggles that we were facing because it seems they did not know and, if they did not know about us, how could they care about us? I also want to say that it was an honor for us to meet them.
What do you think they heard, and what do you think they didn’t hear?
A lot of people listened and nodded when we talked about climate change in Malawi, but many also didn’t understand. They agreed that the weather was different, but disagreed that it was something that was the result of humans. They said it was impossible for humans to do this to the weather, or said that it was God’s will. This means that, even if their hearts were touched when we told them of our suffering, they did not understand that the way they live is causing that suffering.
Video From The New Yorker
How Wearing Silly Hats Helped a Mom Find Joy
If those Midwest farmers came to your community and your farm, what would you like them to learn from the experience?
I would be very happy if they came to my farm. I would teach them how we return the stalks and residue to the soils, how we plant soybeans and add manure from animals to heal the soil. If we take care of the soil, it will yield, and our lives can be healthy, without malnutrition.
But I would also show them how far we have to walk for water. In America, you have so much water. Here, our boreholes are drying up for longer each year. For us, it can be that it takes an hour to walk for water, and then you have to wait in a queue. I would show them how climate change makes life harder for women. If men don’t understand gender equality here, it makes life harder for their wives and daughters, who have to walk farther to find water.
And I would show them how men and women share work here. We have Recipe Days, when men and boys learn to cook, and everyone learns to experiment with new kinds of food. It helps us to bring about gender equality. We did not see as much of that in America as we do in our villages. Some people in America have a very traditional view of what men and women should do. If we are to work together, America needs to let go of its backward thinking.
Climate School
The biggest news of the week was Tuesday’s report from the International Energy Administration (I.E.A.) explaining that, to have any chance of meeting the temperature target set in the Paris accord, new development of coal, gas, and oil has to cease now. This epochal statement will be reverberating for weeks. (I wrote about it here.) For now, this interview with the I.E.A. executive director, Fatih Birol, gets the message across concisely. Putting new money into fossil fuel, Birol said, would be “junk investments.”
The fight over the Line 3 pipeline—which activists conducted as best they could during a long pandemic winter in Minnesota—is slowly nationalizing. The Seattle City Council voted to oppose the pipeline plan, becoming the first non-tribal government to do so. Meanwhile, activists announced plans for what looks to be a large gathering bent on nonviolent direct action along the pipeline route in June. Success would probably require making Line 3 enough of a national issue that the Biden Administration feels the need to intervene. Meanwhile, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, offers an impassioned defense of her efforts to shut down the Line 5 oil pipeline through the Great Lakes.
Department of I Didn’t See That Coming: A new report shows that rising carbon-dioxide emissions are lowering the density of the upper atmosphere and, in the process, could reduce the amount of space junk normally incinerated as it begins to return toward Earth. In a worst-case scenario, the amount of satellite-killing debris in orbit could increase fifty times by 2100—a “more probable outcome” is a tenfold or twentyfold increase.
The Guardian’s environment editor Damian Carrington offers a handy taxonomy for figuring out what’s greenwashing and what’s real progress.
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, community leaders, including Elizabeth Yeampierre, of UPROSE, were part of a push toward a new clean-energy model for the waterfront, through the development of an offshore wind project. Now, such a project will be built by the Norwegian oil company Equinor. As Inside Climate News reports, the waterfront’s “73 acres of cracked concrete and rusting fences will be cleared away and replaced with the modern port that will anchor the burgeoning offshore wind industry. Crumbling bulkheads will be shored up to support 200-foot cranes. The decrepit piers, which look out over Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be reinforced to hold turbine blades as long as football fields.”
Tasmania was one of the birthplaces of green politics, and Christine Milne, a former senator from the Australian Greens party, is hard at work restoring Lake Pedder, which was vastly expanded in the nineteen-seventies by flooding from a huge hydroelectricity project. As she makes clear in this video, the ancient glacial lake is a prime candidate for restoration to its original state, as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which will run through 2030, commences.
Together with the activist pranksters the Yes Men and the Fixers Fix, the young climate campaigners of Fridays for Future pulled a prank on the U.K.’s Standard Chartered Bank, though it’s sad that a declaration from a bank that it will stop funding fossil fuels is more likely to be a spoof than reality.
Brentwood, California—which is about fifty miles east of Berkeley—decided not to renew a franchise for a pipeline that runs through a corner of the city. Council members and residents, the Mercury News reported, “had many questions concerning safety of the pipeline that flows 1.8 million cubic feet of natural gas daily through the city, including near several subdivisions, which were not built at the time the pipeline was constructed. ‘I’ll be honest, I have concerns,’ Councilwoman Jovita Mendoza said. ‘It’s right by school, and that makes me super uncomfortable.’ ”
Scoreboard
A new study finds that a third of global food production may be at risk by century’s end if greenhouse-gas emissions keep rising at a rapid rate. But, if we meet the targets set in the Paris accord, only five to eight per cent of our harvests may be in danger.
Pressure is building on the investment giant T.I.A.A. to divest from fossil fuels. The asset manager, which handles the pensions of many teachers and university professors, has more clients in the State University of New York system than any other university—and last week members of the University at Albany’s faculty senate followed the lead of their colleagues on other campuses and voted to ask T.I.A.A. to get out of fossil fuels.
A new paper from the Carbon Tracker initiative in London shows that, contrary to a downbeat assessment from the International Energy Agency, there’s enough easily available lithium and other minerals to keep the renewables boom going—and that the switch from fossil fuels should dramatically decrease the total amount of mining activity on the planet. It appears to answer many of the concerns raised in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on the same topic.
Amid the tragic fighting in the Middle East, the outgoing (Jewish) and incoming (Muslim) executive directors of the Arava Institute, perhaps the region’s leading environmental-studies center, issued a plea for peace and for joint work on larger issues. “Instead of turning our attention to the common threats we face from a pandemic still out of control in Gaza and the West Bank, the economic fallout from the pandemic, and the looming impact of climate change, we find ourselves embroiled once again in violence and the historic political conflict. We call on the government of Israel to prevent further violent escalation and implore leaders in the region to reject a return to tribalism and find a path towards peace, reconciliation, security, justice and self-determination for all.”
Warming Up
Bettye LaVette’s version of “Blackbird” is killer anytime, but, just to remind ourselves that people aren’t the only ones with a stake in the climate outcome, here’s an old video of the ecologist Curt Stager playing the same song—for a black bird. It will make you grin.
Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.
Ur house is burning
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57261670
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This board is for the accumulation of articles, pictures and anything else related to natural disasters and the many changes currently underway on our planet.
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Weather Links
http://www.weather.org/directory.htm
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NASA Global Climate Change
https://climate.nasa.gov/
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
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http://www.globalchange.gov/agency/national-aeronautics-space-administration
http://lcluc.umd.edu/
NOAA Climate Prediction Center
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/
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https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
https://www.climate.gov/
http://cires.colorado.edu/
Global Change / Government
http://www.globalchange.gov/
http://www.globalchange.gov/agency/department-defense
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https://www.epa.gov/
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http://www.globalchange.gov/agency/agency-international-development
https://www.boem.gov/Environmental-Stewardship/Environmental-Assessment/NEPA/procedure/climate/index.aspx
http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/climatechange/climatescience.htm
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US Drought Portal
https://www.drought.gov/drought/
https://www.fema.gov/
https://www.usda.gov/topics/disaster/drought
PES Network Inc. > Daily Free/Renewable Energy Technology News and Directory
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Tidal/index.html
Newscientist.com
http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns
An open community site for golbal warming news and activism
http://www.hotglobe.org/
live Science
http://www.livescience.com/
Earthquakes
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/
Science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory
Kyoto Protocol - Core Issues
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/kyoto/index.asp
Pure Energy Systems
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Latest
USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report
http://www.volcano.si.edu/reports/usgs/index.cfm?content=worldmap
Global Warming - Early Warning Signs
http://www.climatehotmap.org/index.html
Extreme Instability - Storm Chasers
http://www.extremeinstability.com/index.htm
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Inside Climate News
https://insideclimatenews.org/
Environmental Defense
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/home.cfm
The Envirolink Network
http://www.envirolink.org/
The methodic demise of natural earth, by Dr. Michael Castle.
http://www.chemtrails.ch/dokumentationen/THE-METHODIC-DEMISE.htm
Ips News - Environment
http://ipsnews.net/environment.asp
Cool Earth
http://www.coolearth.org/
Save The High Seas
http://www.savethehighseas.org/
Climate Connections
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9657621
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/climateconnections/?fs=www7.nationalgeographic.com
National Snow and Ice Data Center
http://nsidc.org/index.html http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
National Geographic - Environment
http://green.nationalgeographic.com/environment/index.html
American Rivers
http://www.americanrivers.org/
CNN World
http://www.cnn.com/world
Green Energy - San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/environment-science/
Conservation News and Environmental Science News
http://news.mongabay.com/
Guardian / Environment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment
INside Climate News
http://insideclimatenews.org/
The Ecologist
http://www.theecologist.org/
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
https://www.rt.com/trends/fukushima-nuclear-disaster/
Global Climate Change Vital Signs Of The Planet
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
Climate News from Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/climate
Climate Change news and analysis from The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/subject/climate-change/
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http://www.climatecentral.org/
The Guardian / Environment
https://www.theguardian.com/us/environment
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/this-land-is-your-land
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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/
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https://glp.earth/
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http://ecointernet.org/
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http://www.globalforestwatch.org/
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National Wildlife Federation
http://www.nwf.org/
https://twitter.com/NWF
Green Peace
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/getinvolved/
https://twitter.com/Greenpeace
Sea Shephard Conservation Society
http://www.seashepherd.org/
https://twitter.com/SeaShepherdSSCS
https://twitter.com/seashepherd
https://twitter.com/CaptPaulWatson
Global Giving
https://www.globalgiving.org/ ----- #msg-134648450
Charity Navigator
https://www.charitynavigator.org/
Disaster Assistance
https://www.disasterassistance.gov/
Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump
http://www.stopthegreatlakesnucleardump.com/
http://www.sosgreatlakes.org/news-1/2016/6/21/its-time-to-speak-up-let-your-voice-be-heard
http://www.sosgreatlakes.org/
https://twitter.com/sosgreatlakes
https://twitter.com/stopthenukedump
https://www.facebook.com/Stop-The-Great-Lakes-Nuclear-Dump-488484027858649/
Earth Focus
https://www.linktv.org/shows/earth-focus
Environment Integrity
http://www.environmentalintegrity.org/
Alternet Environment
http://www.alternet.org/environment
Seeker Earth / Climate
https://www.seeker.com/earth/climate
Ecowatch
https://www.ecowatch.com/
NY Times - Climate & Environment
https://www.nytimes.com/section/climate?action=click&contentCollection=Climate®ion=TopBar&module=HomePage-Title&pgtype=Multimedia
UCS - Uniion of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucsusa.org/?_ga=2.259145421.693311558.1506879949-1069869955.1506879949#.WdEp5rpFzmI
Harvard - School of Public Health
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/
The Climate Report
https://www.sapiens.org/columns/the-climate-report/
Climate Desk
http://www.climatedesk.org/
https://twitter.com/ClimateDesk
https://www.facebook.com/theclimatedesk/
BBC Science and Environment
http://www.bbc.com/news/science_and_environment
British Antarctic Survey
https://www.bas.ac.uk/
Scientific Committee on Antarctic research
https://www.scar.org/
Climate Research AWI
https://www.awi.de/en.html
Global Carbon Project
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/
Center for International Climate Research
https://www.cicero.uio.no/en
River of Souls
https://riveroflostsouls.com/
The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/us/environment
Zero Hour
http://thisiszerohour.org/
SECURING THE LEGAL RIGHT TO A SAFE CLIMATE
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/
Mother Earth Project™A Global Environment-Saving Initiative Creating and Activating Sustainable Communities
https://motherearthproject.org/
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