December, 2019

Much of my news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. They stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal.

  • James Baldwin:
    • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." —Notes of a Native Son
    • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
    • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
  • "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
  • "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
  • Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm, away from the noise of that blowhard, the liar-in-chief. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.

December, 2019

12/31/2019

  • Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work: In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.
  • Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt: First Big Pharma fled the field, and now start-ups are going belly up, threatening to stifle the development of new drugs.
    • Antibiotic start-ups like Achaogen and Aradigm have gone belly up in recent months, pharmaceutical behemoths like Novartis and Allergan have abandoned the sector and many of the remaining American antibiotic companies are teetering toward insolvency. One of the biggest developers of antibiotics, Melinta Therapeutics, recently warned regulators it was running out of cash.
    • Experts say the grim financial outlook for the few companies still committed to antibiotic research is driving away investors and threatening to strangle the development of new lifesaving drugs at a time when they are urgently needed. “This is a crisis that should alarm everyone,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.
    • Drug-resistant infections now kill 35,000 people in the United States each year and sicken 2.8 million, according a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last month. Without new therapies, the United Nations says the global death toll could soar to 10 million by 2050.
    • “If this doesn’t get fixed in the next six to 12 months, the last of the Mohicans will go broke and investors won’t return to the market for another decade or two,” said Chen Yu, a health care venture capitalist who has invested in the field.
    • Many of the new drugs are not cheap, at least when compared to older generics that can cost a few dollars a pill. A typical course of Xerava, a newly approved antibiotic that targets multi-drug-resistant infections, can cost as much as $2,000. “Unlike expensive new cancer drugs that extend survival by three-to-six months, antibiotics like ours truly save a patient’s life,” said Larry Edwards, chief executive of the company that makes Xerava, Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals. “It’s frustrating.”
  • For Better Brain Health, Preserve Your Hearing: Hearing loss is the largest modifiable risk factor for developing dementia, exceeding that of smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and social isolation.
    • Last year in a column entitled “Hearing Loss Threatens Mind, Life and Limb,” I summarized the current state of knowledge about the myriad health-damaging effects linked to untreated hearing loss, a problem that afflicts nearly 38 million Americans and, according to two huge recent studies, increases the risk of dementia, depression, falls and even cardiovascular diseases.
    • “In people with very good hearing, we need to be aware of how early changes in hearing affect the brain,” said Dr. Frank Lin, director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Without a doubt, the most important measure to preserve hearing is protection against noise.”
    • He urges people who listen to music through headphones or earbuds to invest in ones with a noise-canceling feature that blocks ambient sound. This enables people to listen to their preferred music or programs at a lower volume that is less damaging to hearing. Apple, for example, now markets AirPods Pro earbuds that have a noise cancellation feature. At $249 a pair, they are a lot cheaper than currently available hearing aids.
  • Bank of England boss calls for faster action on climate change:
    • Asked whether pension funds should divest from fossil fuels even if the returns are currently attractive, Carney said: ‘Well, that hasn’t been the case, but they could make that argument. They need to make the argument, to be clear about why is that going to be the case if a substantial proportion of those assets are going to be worthless.’ Carney noted that ‘up to 80 percent of coal assets will be stranded (and) up to half of developed oil reserves’ if current climate targets are to be met.
  • Airlines start carbon offsetting to combat flight shame: As travellers begin to turn their backs on air travel in favour of more eco-friendly options such as trains, airlines are responding to a growing sense of ‘flight shame’ among passengers by paying to offset CO2 emissions from jet fuel. Emily Eastman reports

12/30/2019

  • How to survive a shipwreck: A sea level rise story: There are many lessons climate scientists can learn from mātauranga Māori. Lesson one is: don’t panic.
    • “Well, like I said, it’s not the first time I’ve had to swim for my life. I didn’t panic.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Panic’s what kills you, you know.” He told me that he flipped over onto his back for a while to rest and get his breath back, and a moment later he felt something hit his shoulder. He turned around to see his fish bin floating past. “Well I grabbed that and turned it upside down to trap the air. Then I pitched myself across it and just lay there, heading out towards Australia.”
    • Like the word kaitiakitanga, mātauranga Māori is a term that is becoming more and more familiar to Pākehā scientists in the climate change space. Loosely translated it means ‘knowledge.’ It is often seen by Western science as a Māori perspective on science, or as Simon Wilson suggested, ‘a cultural overlay’. In fact, we could describe mātauranga as a complete system of knowledge and Western science as the cultural overlay. Science is based on evidence and observation, and accumulates data to generate pictures and predictions. But in order for the information to make any sense it still needs to take the shape of a story. This is where science tends to fall down and mātauranga excels. Facts just don’t make for very memorable or compelling characters.
    • To restore the balance it isn’t necessary for everyone to understand every detail about how natural environmental processes work. In fact, Māori Marsden suggests that ‘know how’ is pointless without ‘know why’. He says that it is far more important to connect the information with our beliefs and value systems. Individually and collectively, we need to live much more consciously with the understanding that everything we do and every consumer choice we make (or don’t make) will have repercussions, positive or negative, somewhere else in the ecosystem on which we depend. Lani says that it’s not about the management of nature, but how we manage ourselves to live in a relationship with nature. “Science is only part of the answer. For us in Te Arawa, we need to incorporate our values. Then we can ask ourselves, are we all doing our part to deliver on those values?”
    • This is a vital motivating connection that the western climate change narrative is often lacking – or conveyed using binaries that have the opposite effect on people, creating fear, confusion, anxiety and apathy. It’s not that science isn’t valuable, it’s that the advice and findings aren’t always packaged or delivered in a way that policy makers, let alone the layperson, can apply or comprehend.
    • “I turned around and wow, we were right by the mouth. It was steep like a waterfall. I looked at how much net was still to bring in and could see it was too much. We were powering towards the mouth. I yelled to my mate, get the net out of the boat! But we couldn’t get it out, the anchor got stuck under the seat! I said to my mate, cut the rope! And he goes, I can’t, I left the knife in the car! A huge wave came and picked us up and dumped us upside down. I came up and looked around and my mate was near the boat. He was struggling, calling for help. ‘Cuz! Cuz! Help me!’ He had a huge swandri on and gumboots. I told him he was gonna end up like a fish caught in the net if he didn’t get out of there. I got him to take off his boots. Showed him how to get across the breakers. I had to take a hold of him and turn him over onto his back because he was struggling. I told him to relax and let himself go, and that’s how we made it to shore. Used the waves to swim and turned over to rest whenever we got tired. The next day we went back to the river and picked up the net. The boat got smashed up on some rocks but the paddles were there. My mate didn’t want to come out, he was scared of sharks. I said: Don’t think about sharks, just keep focused on what we’re here for. So I swam out, pulled the net in, and it was full of fish!”
    • I asked Hank if he ever wondered what Tangaroa was trying to tell him with all these close-calls and he laughed. “I suppose I ask myself, what did you get saved for? Why did the atua bring you back? Must have been for something. Maybe that’s why I am here. To do this work. I know I’ll never die by drowning, I can swim like a fish!”
  • New industry develops around sucking carbon dioxide out of atmosphere: Carbon Engineering's groundbreaking plant is one project hoping to help combat climate change
  • What you can do in 2020 to keep the world from burning up: Don Pittis: Fighting climate change is hard but possible if we focus on the best techniques
    • Delayed by overthrowing capitalism
      • Any journalist who has interviewed climate activists has encountered those who say the real problem is eating meat, for example, or that climate change is an inevitable product of capitalism. But if we have to convert everyone to vegetarianism or overthrow the capitalist state before moving on to the fight against climate change, it is likely we'll never get to the main job. Certainly not in time. And while Jaccard says he wants to avoid alienating the many enthusiasts who are fighting climate change in their own way, one of the cornerstones of his strategy for 2020 is to help us narrow the focus down to what is essential, while striking off the to-do list things that might be nice some day or are positively inimical to the climate project.
      • Among things to strike off the list is the idea that humans must transform their behaviour. Declaring that we must wait for people to stop flying in planes, stop driving cars, eat only vegetables and end economic growth before we can make progress offers an easy out to the powerful forces that would be happy for us to take no action at all.
      • He is also horrified by those who keep telling us that market forces or innovation by business will do the job for us. Jaccard says that view ignores how useful fossil fuels have been to humanity as a source of concentrated energy and how essential they will continue to be as we make the transition, one that will be far from effortless.
    • While business can perform a valuable role, with fossil fuels so cheap and easy to use, the economic pressure to act must come from government regulation. Without government rules, the free market would simply continue to use the atmosphere as a free garbage dump for carbon.
    • That's why the first step of Jaccard's strategy is to put the immediate effort on two areas that mostly affect a country's domestic markets. Those two areas, energy production and transport — essentially power plants and cars and trucks — are responsible for the majority of most countries' greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, that transition will lay foundations that will make later industrial decarbonization easier. As we have seen, cutting carbon with carbon pricing or regulation is not politically painless, so the main efforts from citizens should be directed at the political process by encouraging what Jaccard calls "climate-sincere" politicians. Since making real economic changes is politically difficult, politicians prefer ineffective window-dressing that does little except making voters think they are taking action.
  • Greta Thunberg: climate activism has made her 'very happy', says father: Svante Thunberg says he was concerned about his daughter’s school strike but that her campaigning had helped her beat depression
    • Svante Thunberg reveals how activism had changed the outlook of the teenager, who suffered from depression for “three or four years” before she began her school strike protest outside the Swedish parliament. She was now “very happy”, he said. “She stopped talking … she stopped going to school,” he said of her illness, adding that it was the the “ultimate nightmare for a parent” when Greta began refusing to eat.
  • In Protesting Climate Change, Jane Fonda Brings Hollywood to Washington: The actress was joined by her “Grace and Frankie” co-star Lily Tomlin to headline a climate rally that offered plenty of chances to get arrested, but few takers.
    • On Friday, the police offered two warnings by bullhorn. After the second, a weary-sounding officer at the top of the steps said, “All right, guys, if you’re not looking to get locked up, you’re going to want to proceed down the stairs to the outer perimeter.” After a few more selfies, most in the group obliged.
  • The people of this remote Canadian island village are taking government money to clear out. One couple is staying. Faced with mounting debt and still struggling to recover from a fishery collapse and an oil-price slump, the government pays households in declining, expensive-to-serve communities $190,000 to $205,000 to move — and then cuts off services to the community.
    • The people of Little Bay Islands voted unanimously this year to abandon the island — the eighth such community to make the decision in the last two decades. Derrick Bragg, the provincial minister of municipal affairs and the environment, said resettlement will cost $6.61 million but will save the province roughly $15 million over two decades. He gave the green light in April.
  • Revealed: microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers: Exclusive: London has highest level yet recorded but health impacts of breathing particles are unknown
    • They were found in all eight samples, with deposition rates ranging from 575 to 1,008 pieces per sq metre per day, and 15 different plastics were identified. Most microplastics were fibres made of acrylic, most likely from clothing. Just 8% of the microplastics were particles, and these were mostly polystyrene and polyethylene, both commonly used in food packaging.
    • The microplastic particles in London were between 0.02mm and 0.5mm. These are large enough to be deposited on to the airways when inhaled and would be swallowed in saliva. Smaller particles that can get into the lungs and bloodstream represent the greatest potential health hazard. These were seen in the samples but their composition could not be identified with current technology.
    • The serious health damage caused by the pollution particles emitted by traffic and industry are well known. A comprehensive global review earlier in 2019 concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body.

12/29/2019

  • Is Extreme Cold In Alaska This Week That Unusual? - The Answer Might Surprise You:
    • 960x0.jpg
      The graphic above shows that record temperatures in this part of Alaska have been much colder at this time of the year. A 2016 National Academy of Sciences report on extreme weather attribution confirms the most “extreme cold events” are happening with less frequency or intensity, on average. The report ranked the level of confidence in science understanding of climate change linkages to different types of extreme events. This statement is telling:
      • The most dependable attribution findings are for those events related to an aspect of temperature, for which there is little doubt that human activity has caused an observed change in the long-term trend, the report notes. For example, a warmer climate increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and decreases the likelihood of extremely cold days.
      • With a record low temp at Bettles on both Dec 26 and Dec 27, here’s the new tally of records at major stations in Alaska in 2019: Record highs: 326 Record lows: 11 @AlaskaWx (Dr. Brian Brettschneider, Research Associates and Postdoctoral Fellows Anchorage, AK)

12/28/2019

  • Landmark ruling that Holland must cut emissions to protect citizens from climate change upheld by supreme court: Decision ‘provides a clear path forward for concerned individuals to undertake climate litigation’
    • The highest court in the Netherlands has upheld a landmark ruling that defines protection from the devastation of climate change as a human right and requires the government to set more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions as a result.
    • The Dutch government will now have to cut emissions by at least 25 per cent by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.
    • The court found that, based on the European Convention on Human Rights, the government had a legal duty to protect its citizens from climate breakdown, and should shape policy accordingly. Experts said this paved the way for activists in all 47 member states on the Council of Europe to use the courts to ensure their governments took appropriate measures to prevent climate breakdown.
  • U.S. judge rejects Trump's bid to dismiss lawsuit over Keystone XL pipeline approval: However, Indigenous groups were denied a request for a preliminary injunction
    • On Friday, Montana Federal District Judge Brian Morris rejected the motion, stating that Indigenous and environmental groups against the $8 billion US project have made credible claims that should proceed to a merit hearing. The Indigenous groups claim Trump violated the law when he approved the pipeline, and that the pipeline would have negative impacts on the environment and traditional, cultural sites.
  • HUMANURE HANDBOOK, 4th EDITION
  • A Field Guide for the Entire 21st Century: A new project reveals not just where birds live now—but where they’ll live decades from now.
  • A Sea Change in Fuel Prices Is Imminent: January’s deadline to use cleaner marine fuel could ripple through the global fuel market on land and sea
  • Global warming could be boon for prairie crops: Canada is one of the few regions of the world where crop yields will benefit from global warming, according to a recently published Agriculture Canada research paper.
    41-canola-yields-map.jpg
    • “The findings indicate that climate at the global warming levels up to 3 C above the (baseline) could be beneficial for crop production of small grains in Canada,” stated the study published in the July 1, 2019, edition of Environmental Research Letters.
    • Global warming is projected to be far more intense in Canada than the rest of the world. Canada’s mean air surface temperature has warmed by 1.8 C between 1950 and 2016, which is about double the global mean temperature increase. Canada’s warming rate is projected to continue at a faster pace than the global rate due to polar amplification. That is important since heat stress can reduce crop yields. However, there is another factor at work that is expected to more than offset the yield losses associated with heat stress in the years to come. “Due to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, C3 crops like canola and wheat can have more effective carbon dioxide responses to carbon assimilation than C4 crops such as corn,” study lead author Budong Qian said in an email.
  • The Most Detailed Map of Auto Emissions in America: Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the United States today and the bulk of those emissions come from driving in our cities and suburbs.
  • A Boom Time for the Bunker Business and Doomsday Capitalists: Personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats.
    • Mr. Hall has converted a former military nuclear missile vault into a luxury condominium built 15 stories into the Earth’s crust. He is a leader among a new group of real estate developers investing in the nation’s central prairies and Western foothills: doomsday capitalists.
  • Megafarms and deeper wells are draining the water beneath rural Arizona – quietly, irreversibly: Vast expanses of lush green fields are multiplying in the Arizona desert, forming agricultural empires nourished with billions of gallons of groundwater in the otherwise parched landscape.
    • Arizona’s groundwater levels are plummeting in many areas. The problem is especially severe in unregulated rural areas where there are no limits on pumping. The water levels in more than 2,000 wells have dropped more than 100 feet since they were first drilled. The number of newly constructed wells is accelerating, and wells are being drilled deeper and hitting water at lower levels.
    • In an unprecedented examination of the state’s groundwater, The Arizona Republic analyzed water-level data for more than 33,000 wells throughout Arizona, including some records going back more than 100 years, and nearly 250,000 well-drilling records. The investigation found the water levels in nearly one in four wells in Arizona’s groundwater monitoring program have dropped more than 100 feet since they were drilled, a loss that scientists and water experts say is likely irrecoverable. Nearly half of the wells with five or more measurements have dropped more than 50 feet at some point since record-keeping began. And that’s only in a limited number of wells whose owners agreed to be voluntarily monitored.
    • Arizona doesn't require meters on wells in many areas, meaning no one really knows how much water is being pumped out.
    • Rodney Hayes’ well went dry in July, as his wife, Nancy Blevins, was washing the dishes. Their pump burned up when the water level dropped, and the two, who live near a giant Saudi Arabian hay farm in Vicksburg, had to look for water elsewhere.
    • In Pinal County, in the Maricopa-Stanfield basin around Maricopa, monitored wells have declined by 125 feet since the 1950s. In the area around Vicksburg, where the 10,000-acre Saudi hay farming operation opened five years ago to ship hay back home, the average water level has dropped 120 feet since the '50s.
    • With water tables falling, state drilling records show that more and more wells are being drilled, and they’re being drilled deeper. The wells in the overstressed Willcox basin were drilled 358 feet deeper on average in 2018 than they were in 2010. Nearby in San Simon, wells were 211 feet deeper. In the Wellton-Mohawk basin, which straddles Interstate 8 on the way to Yuma, the average well was drilled 741 feet deeper in 2018 than in 2010. In the Hualapai Valley around Kingman, where large corporate farms have spurred calls for regulation, wells were drilled an average of 280 feet deeper than eight years ago.
  • New Age pioneer Baba Ram Dass dies at age 88: Ram Dass promoted LSD as path to enlightenment before undergoing spiritual rebirth detailed in the influential book Be Here Now
    • Baba Ram Dass, who in the 1960s joined Timothy Leary in promoting psychedelic drugs as the path to inner enlightenment before undergoing a spiritual rebirth he spelled out in the influential book Be Here Now, died at home on Sunday. He was 88 years old.
    • Ram Dass and Leary wanted to open the mind to a deeper consciousness and conducted experiments that included giving the drug to “jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists”. Afterward, they had them fill out questionnaires about their experiences. Ram Dass said the subjects found bliss, heightened physical senses, accelerated thought processes, a relaxing of biases and hallucinatory experiences, such as seeing God.
    • In an effort to avoid the disappointment of “coming down” from a drug experience, Ram Dass said he and five others locked themselves in a building at the estate for three weeks and took LSD every four hours. “What happened in those three weeks in that house no one would ever believe, including us,” he wrote in Be Here Now, but they were not able to avoid the inevitable return to reality.
    • As the hippie movement grew, Ram Dass and Leary were among the counterculture luminaries at the Human Be-in, a 1967 gathering of some 25,000 people in San Francisco where Leary spread his “turn on, tune in, drop out” credo. Poets such as Ginsberg and Michael McClure, anti-war activists Dick Gregory and Jerry Rubin and rock acts Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane also took part.

12/22/2019

  • Heat the Arctic to cool the Earth, scientists say: The problem that needs to be overcome is that very cold and only mildly salty water currently floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, freezing in the winter and capturing the warmth of the water in the ocean depths.
    • They suggest three ways to keep fresh water out of the Arctic. The first would divert the big rivers of North America and Siberia southwards to prevent them draining into the polar ocean. The second would place submerged obstructions in front of the rapidly melting Greenland glaciers, to slow the speed of the ice sheets’ melting, while the third would use a solar- and wind-powered icebreaker to pump cold, near-fresh water deeper into the ocean to mix with the saltier water below, allowing the warmer currents to sweep in from the south.
    • But Dr Hunt says that while there are clearly huge risks, the world is already heading for uncharted waters, so humans must do something drastic. “Although it is important to mitigate the impacts from climate change with the reduction in CO2 emissions, we should also think of ways to adapt the world to the new climate conditions to avoid uncontrollable, unpredictable and destructive climate change resulting in socio-economic and environmental collapse. [ael: these authors don't think that raising the temperature of the Arctic by 20C isn't going to cause uncontrollable, unpredictable and destructive change?]
  • We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked: Worst-Case Scenario Looks Unrealistic
    • A few weeks ago, the International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook 2019. The IEA is not known to be optimistic, at least to climate advocates, who have, for years, mocked its projections for future renewable growth: Every year, the agency basically predicts a plateau for renewable use, and every year renewables keep dramatically growing. This made the most noteworthy prediction in this year’s report even more so. According to the IEA report, given only current carbon policies, which nearly everyone studying climate considers terribly weak, the world is on track for about 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, which could, if existing pledges were implemented, be brought down as low as 2.7 degrees — about one and a half degrees less warming than is suggested by the U.N.’s IPCC reports in what is often referred to as the “business as usual” “RCP8.5” scenario.
    • … the assumptions about those factors which are baked into RCP8.5 seem, by the year, more and more implausible — chiefly that global coal use, which is growing slowly, would dramatically increase over the rest of the century. Given that China is still opening new coal plants, and much of the developing world has yet to reach levels of prosperity where energy use explodes, some growth in coal is probably inevitable, perhaps even dramatic growth. But by 2100, RCP8.5 would require 6.5 times as much global coal use as we have today. That may be possible, given how much we don’t know about the path developing nations in south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will take. But given recent drops in renewable pricing, and the positive signs for coal decline in the developed world, as a prediction about energy use RCP8.5 is probably closer to a “worst case,” outlier scenario than anything it would be fair to call “business as usual.”
    • But in a remarkably insightful paper published by the Breakthrough Institute on Wednesday — “in a right and just world, this would be the most high-impact piece of climate writing of the month of December,” the Niskanen Center’s Joseph Majkut said on Twitter — Zeke Hausfather and Justin Ritchie modeled the remainder of the century based on some very conservative assumptions. In one scenario, they assumed emissions would peak in 2040 and hold steady rather than decline until 2100; in the other, they assumed emissions would steadily grow from 2040 until the end of the century. They ran those emissions figures through the IPCC’s own basic temperature calculator and found “that transitions in the global energy system over the past decade mean that a conservative business-as-usual projection of current trends in the energy system continuing is now likely to lead to warming of around 3C by 2100.” Further, while they acknowledge a higher-emissions world than the IEA projects is possible, they conclude that “it may be possible under an optimistic business-as-usual case to have as little as 2.5C warming by the end of the century, though anything below that is very unlikely to happen in the absence of policy given the rate of emissions reductions required.”
    • The math — ten years left at current emissions — is actually bleaker than it might seem at first, since running through ten years at the current rate would only land us at 1.5 degrees if, immediately thereafter, we went all the way to zero, never again emitting another ounce of carbon, let alone a gigaton, of which we are today producing, from industrial processes and fossil-fuel burning, 37 each year. A gigaton is, keep in mind, a billion tons. Which makes not just 1.5 degrees but, I think, 2 degrees, for all practical purposes out of reach. As a reminder, this is a level of warming that the IPCC has called “catastrophic” and the island nations of the world have described as “genocide.”
    • [ael: so that's the good news.]
    • The third takeaway is that anyone who sees a world of 3 degrees warming — or even 2.5 degrees — as a positive or happy outcome has a pretty grotesque, or at least deluded, perspective on human suffering. At just two degrees, the U.N. estimates, damages from storms and sea-level rise could grow 100-fold. Cities in South Asia and the Middle East that are today home to many millions of people would be so hot during summer heat waves, scientists have projected, even going outside during the day could mean risking heatstroke or heat death. The number of climate refugees could pass 200 million, according to the U.N., and more than 150 million would die from the impacts of air pollution alone. North of two degrees, of course, the strain accumulates and intensifies, and while some amount of human adaptation to these forces is inevitable, the scale of adaptation required at even two degrees begins to seem close to impossible.
  • Teach-In: Who’s to blame, who's to pay? Holding Fossil Fuel Corporations Accountable:
    • In this Thursday Teach-In, our focus will be Fossil Fuel Companies. Sure, there are many factors that led to today’s climate crisis and many ways to look at who is responsible for this complex problem, but there is one group of industries above all else which is especially responsible and needs to be held accountable: fossil fuel corporations. It is now proven that fossil fuel corporations, like Exxon, knew about climate change a half century ago. But rather than use that precious time to lead a transition to clean, safe, renewable energy, protecting workers and communities during the transition, these corporations deceived the public through spreading fake science and climate denialism, misled their shareholders, viciously expanded their fossil fuel exploration and extraction, blocked climate solutions at the state and federal level, sought to silence dissent and protest, and robbed humanity of a generation’s worth of time to advance solutions. And these companies were – and still are – facilitated by the banks, investors and insurance companies that continue to finance and insure fossil fuel projects, long after the science was clear that our collective survival depends on winding down, not ramping up, fossil fuel production.
    • [ael: proud that my arrest with Jane on Jan. 3rd will be focused on the true Climate Saboteurs, the fossil fuel companies.]
    • For decades, fossil fuel companies took a page from Big Tobacco and tried to hide the truth, demonstrating a callous disregard for human well being. But around the world, people are banding together to say ENOUGH. It’s time we take back our government, our energy system and our future from these corporations whose decisions and deceit disproportionately contributed to today’s climate crisis.

12/21/2019

  • Top scientists warn of an Amazon ‘tipping point’: Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.
    • “The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances. “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”
    • Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.
    • The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”
    • Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which has long stored massive amounts of carbon in its frozen soil.
    • Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon. Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.
    • Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompose.
  • Satellite observations reveal extreme methane leakage from a natural gas well blowout:
    • Methane emissions due to accidents in the oil and natural gas sector are very challenging to monitor, and hence are seldom considered in emission inventories and reporting. One of the main reasons is the lack of measurements during such events. Here we report the detection of large methane emissions from a gas well blowout in Ohio during February to March 2018 in the total column methane measurements from the spaceborne Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). From these data, we derive a methane emission rate of 120 ± 32 metric tons per hour. This hourly emission rate is twice that of the widely reported Aliso Canyon event in California in 2015. Assuming the detected emission represents the average rate for the 20-d blowout period, we find the total methane emission from the well blowout is comparable to one-quarter of the entire state of Ohio’s reported annual oil and natural gas methane emission, or, alternatively, a substantial fraction of the annual anthropogenic methane emissions from several European countries. Our work demonstrates the strength and effectiveness of routine satellite measurements in detecting and quantifying greenhouse gas emission from unpredictable events. In this specific case, the magnitude of a relatively unknown yet extremely large accidental leakage was revealed using measurements of TROPOMI in its routine global survey, providing quantitative assessment of associated methane emissions.

12/20/2019

  • Young Indigenous activists lead climate justice action in Alaska: Two Alaska Native teenagers pushed for a resolution declaring a climate emergency – and decision-makers listened.
    • “We do not want to stop our ways of life. That’s why we’re here.” Seventeen-year-old Quannah Chasing Horse’s voice broke as she stood on stage in front of a sea of delegates at the Alaska Federation of Natives 2019 Convention in Fairbanks, Alaska. “We shouldn’t have to tell people in charge that we want to survive. It should be our number-one right. We should not have to fight for this.”
    • In appealing to the public for action, Chasing Horse and Peter join the likes of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, and clean-water activist Autumn Peltier, 15, (Wikwemikong First Nation). A groundswell of voices is amplifying the concerns of youth on larger stages — and decision-makers at the state, national and global level are starting to listen. At the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention — a delegation of thousands of Alaska Natives from 12 different regions across the state — they were heard. Before the end of the session, the convention voted to declare a “climate emergency” to a standing ovation from the audience.
    • Still, the resolution faced opposition from delegates with oil and gas interests along the North Slope, who were concerned that it could hamper their ability to develop natural resources and extractive industry. The conflict illustrated philosophical differences between Native communities relying on natural resource development for an economic base and infrastructure, versus communities who see it as a threat to subsistence lifeways.
  • Acidifying Oceans Could Eat Away at Sharks' Skin and Teeth: Researchers show that prolonged exposure to acidified water corrodes the scales that make up a shark's skin.
    • In findings published today in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers show that prolonged exposure to acidified water corrodes the scales, known as denticles, that make up a shark’s skin. To be clear, this work was done in the lab and on only one species, but the implications are troubling. As we belch still more CO2 into the atmosphere, which reacts with seawater and makes the oceans more acidic, the seas themselves could become yet another threat that pushes sharks over the brink.
    • For these experiments, the researchers kept puffadder shysharks—beautiful little mottled creatures that spend their time on the seafloor—in tanks of 7.3 pH water, which is what ocean water could be by 2300, according to one estimate. A shark control group was housed in regular, non-acidic water. After nine weeks, the researchers scrutinized the sharks’ denticles with a scanning electron microscope, which creates super-detailed images by bombarding a surface with electrons. They found that on average, a quarter of the denticles on the sharks in acidic water were damaged, compared to 9.2 percent on the controls.
  • Paris accord ‘impossible to implement’ if tropical forest loss not stopped:
    • Representatives meeting this month from countries around the world in Madrid, Spain for the 25th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP 25) did nothing to help matters, stonewalling virtually all measures to conserve tropical forests. Meanwhile, a clearer picture is emerging as to the effects of tropical deforestation will have in the near future on our planet’s climate — looming consequences appear far bleaker than previously thought.
    • The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) recently published a study in the journal Science Advances suggesting intact tropical forest loss from 2000 to 2013 will result in over 626% more long-term carbon emissions through 2050 than previously thought. The researchers arrived at this upward revision by adding up emissions that would have been removed from the air if tropical forest remained intact, from selective logging, defaunation, and carbon stock degradation at forest edges that had been overlooked in previous studies.
    • Dense intact tropical forests serve as vital carbon sinks, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as their carbon-hungry plants and trees continue to put on growth. And they serve an outsized role in sequestration: while the WCS study found only 20% of the world’s tropical forests can be considered “intact,” these forests store 40% of aboveground carbon found in tropical forests. A 2011 study observed that intact tropical forests remove an estimated 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
    • Evans noted that there are three remaining major blocks of intact tropical forest globally — the Amazon basin, Central Africa, and Papua New Guinea — plus smaller blocks in Southeast Asia, Central America and Madagascar, among others. Although there are higher proportional losses elsewhere, in absolute terms, he said the largest disappearance of tropical forest has taken place in the Amazon basin — mostly taken up by Brazil, a region worth a closer look.
    • In addition to human-caused deforestation and degradation, global warming itself is decreasing the Amazon forest’s ability to store carbon in organic matter, particularly in soils. Soil carbon is decreasing in “undisturbed” Amazon rainforest plots measured near Manaus, Brazil, according to a study done by Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia state (INPA). Researchers warn that the “release of soil carbon can contribute to a positive feedback, where emissions cause greater warming that further augments the emissions.” Put simply, human-caused climate change is causing nature as we know it to change, increasing carbon releases in multiple ways.
    • In the Brazilian Amazon, Nobre suggested that a marked reduction in deforestation would require the government to quickly adopt policies resembling those utilized between 2005 and 2014 when indigenous environmental leaders were more empowered, and authorities aggressively targeted organized environmental crime by putting criminals in jail and destroying their mining and logging equipment, including chainsaws and earthmovers. However, at present under Bolsonaro, arrests and fines for environmental crimes are far fewer, and officials are no longer allowed to destroy illegally deployed equipment.
  • How we know global warming is real: The answer includes Benjamin Franklin, Mutiny on the Bounty and centuries of records.
    • Sonnblick Observatory opened and began recording the weather in 1886, a technological wonder that measured how wind, barometric pressure and temperatures changed at upper altitudes, and during storms.
    • Despite these inconsistencies, and the fact that different research groups apply different adjustments, their conclusions show broad agreement on the degree of warming. There is such an abundance of reliable data now that any incremental adjustment or new method of computation can’t alter the overall number.
    • To rescue these records, researchers have used the sophisticated searchability of this era’s Internet to recruit volunteers passionate about the weather, as well as an earlier era’s efforts to measure and forecast it. Crowd-sourcing projects such as Old Weather, Southern Weather Discovery and WeatherRescue rely on an elaborate human network of amateur historians, who go page by page to replicate the detailed and accurate observations of the past. Each annotation and interpretation is then double- and triple-checked by other volunteers and researchers.
  • Tipping Elements - the Achilles Heels of the Earth System:
    • Tipping elements are components of the Earth system of supra-regional scale which - in terms of background climate - are characterized by a threshold behavior. Once operating near a threshold, these components can be tipped into a qualitatively different state by small external perturbations. To compare them with the human body, tipping elements could be described as organs which drastically alter or stop their usual function if certain requirements, such as oxygen supply, are not sufficiently fulfilled.
      hotspots_2017_e.png

12/19/2019

  • Revealed: Denka lobbied to undermine science behind ‘likely’ cancer-causing toxin: Chemical manufacturer launched aggressive campaign instead of reining in pollution, according to documents
    • Facing public pressure to rein in its pollution, a Japanese chemical manufacturer has instead launched an aggressive, years-long campaign to undermine the science showing that its compounds could cause cancer, according to newly released documents reviewed by the Guardian. Chloroprene, the primary constituent of the synthetic rubber neoprene, is the major air pollutant in the town of Reserve, Louisiana, an area which according to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has the highest risk of cancer due to airborne toxins anywhere in the US.
    • In 2010, the EPA concluded an extensive, independent, peer-reviewed assessment of chloroprene which found that the compound was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans”. The federal government has recommended a maximum level of chloroprene humans should inhale over a lifetime as 0.2 micrograms a cubic metre. The agency, however, doesn’t enforce its guidelines.
    • The plant, named the Pontchartrain Works facility, was built by the US chemicals giant DuPont in the mid-1960s, and began producing neoprene in 1968. DuPont sold the facility to Denka in 2015, shortly before the EPA found that a census tract next door to the plant had a cancer risk rate 5o times the national average.
    • Denka’s campaign began shortly after Donald Trump won election and just days before he took office, with an “urgent” memo to the presidential transition team on 17 January 2017, accusing EPA of “using faulty and highly inflated risk data”.
  • Oilsands Firms ‘Morally Responsible’ for Deaths and Destruction from Climate Disasters: Greenpeace’s Yeb Saño explains what a Philippines human rights investigation means for the fossil fuel industry in Canada.
    • Four years ago, the Philippines Commission on Human Rights began posing an incendiary question. Should 47 of the planet’s most polluting companies have to answer legally for the deaths and suffering caused by climate change?
    • While the commission cannot make legal rulings, it found that the fossil fuel companies under investigation are “morally responsible” for death and destruction linked to their business model. Some legal experts think this could be a starting point for civil and criminal cases against those companies.
  • Norway’s New Oil Chief Has a History Denying Climate Science: The appointment of Sylvi Listhaug as petroleum and energy minister, overseeing the oil industry in western Europe’s biggest crude and gas-producing nation, means business as usual for the Conservative-led government’s mostly pro-oil policies. It also highlights the country’s contradictions as one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel exporters and a would-be leader in the fight against climate change.
    • Listhaug vowed to develop the oil & gas industry further and said climate activists, including striking school children, are giving it too little credit for its contributions to fighting climate change, such as developing greener technology and replacing more-polluting coal in Europe.
  • 7,000-year-old wall against sea level rise uncovered on Carmel Coast: The researchers cautioned that the fate of 7,000-year-old Tel Hreiz should represent a warning for present-day humans.
    • The researchers cautioned that the fate of Tel Hreiz is a warning for present-day humans. They explained that the position and situation of the ancient site are comparable to the ones of modern Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, with a population of over 10 million people. “Modern sea-level rise has already caused lowland coastal erosion around the world. Given the size of coastal populations and settlements, the magnitude of predicted future population displacement differs considerably to the impacts on people during the Neolithic period,” Benjamin said.
    • Today Tel Hreiz is located at a depth between 0 and 4 meters below the waves, and stretches out 100 m into the sea.
  • Donald Trump's Record on Climate Change: Trump's first term has been a relentless drive for unfettered fossil energy development. ICN's 2020 candidate analysis looks at the president's climate record.
    • When U.S. government scientists released their latest volume of the National Climate Assessment, it revealed much about the robust, sobering scientific consensus on climate change. It also revealed the striking disconnect between President Donald Trump and essentially every authoritative institution on the threat of global warming. The president rejected the assessment's central findings—based on thousands of climate studies and involved 13 federal agencies—that emissions of carbon dioxide are caused by human activities, are already causing lasting economic damage, and have to be brought rapidly to zero.
    • "I don't believe it. No, no, I don't believe it," Trump said. Immediately, his cabinet members launched attacks on the report, portraying it as "alarmist" and clinging to Trump's agenda of fossil fuel energy expansion that the science says is at the root of the problem.
    • Trump's intentions, and his administration's deleterious impact on global climate progress, will be evident to voters in 2020 in a way that many failed to grasp four years earlier. The only question is whether those who care about the planet's future can unite as a political force in a way that eluded them in 2016.
  • Rich Nations, After Driving Climate Disaster, Block All Progress at U.N. Talks:
    • Congressional Democrats who visited COP25 in its first week, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were eager to distance themselves from Trump and reiterated their commitment to Paris. Pelosi called the climate crisis “the existential threat of our time,” noting the U.S.’s “moral responsibility to help the world’s most vulnerable populations as we pass this planet on to future generations.” The next week, she jammed through a trade deal (the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) that doesn’t mention climate change and allows the U.S. to expand the export of its emissions abroad, an agreement Sierra Club trade expert Ben Beachy called “an unabashed handout to Exxon and Chevron.”
    • A representative from Tuvalu said the United States’ continual push to block financing for loss and damage “could be considered a crime against humanity.”
    • “We need to understand that we are in a very desperate situation. We have seen how inaction over the last 10 years is piling up pressure on developing countries to deliver and carry the burden of developed countries that kept dragging their feet,” Singh told The Intercept, referring to the U.S. “On finance, across the board they have weakened the text and they don’t want anything substantive to go forward.”
  • As Society Unravels, the Future Is Up for Grabs: As civilization faces existential crisis, our leaders demonstrate their inability to respond. Theory of change shows that now is the time for radically new ideas to transform society before it’s too late.
    • Of all the terrifying news bombarding us from the burning of the Amazon, perhaps the most disturbing was the offer of $22 million made by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other G7 leaders to help Brazil put the fires out. Why is that? The answer can help us hone in on the true structural changes needed to avert civilizational collapse.
    • Macron and the other leaders meeting in late August in Biarritz were well aware of these facts. And yet, in the face of this impending disaster, these supposed leaders of the free world, representing over half the economic wealth of all humanity, offered a paltry $22 million—less than Americans spend on popcorn in a single day. By way of context, global fossil fuel subsidies (much of it from G7 members) total roughly $5.2 trillion annually—over two hundred thousand times the amount offered to help Brazil fight the Amazon fires.
    • There is no clearer evidence of the Global North’s hypocrisy in this regard than the sad story of Ecuador’s Yasuní initiative. In 2007, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa proposed an indefinite ban on oil exploration in the pristine Yasuní National Park—representing 20% of the nation’s oil deposits—as long as the developed world would contribute half the cost that Ecuador faced by foregoing oil revenues. Initially, wealthier countries announced their support for this visionary plan, and a UN-administered fund was established. However, after six years of strenuous effort, Ecuador had received just 0.37% of the fund’s target. With sorrow, the government announced it would allow oil drilling to begin.
    • Studies of past civilizations show that all the major criteria that predictably lead to civilizational collapse are currently confronting us: climate change, environmental degradation, rising inequality, and escalation in societal complexity. As societies begin to unravel, they have to keep running faster and faster to remain in the same place, until finally an unexpected shock arrives and the whole edifice disintegrates.
    • Related: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today, says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.
      • Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives. So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations.
      • Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?
      • p0715m80.png
      • Societies of the past and present are just complex systems composed of people and technology. The theory of “normal accidents” suggests that complex technological systems regularly give way to failure. So collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and stage. We may be more technologically advanced now. But this gives little ground to believe that we are immune to the threats that undid our ancestors. Our newfound technological abilities even bring new, unprecedented challenges to the mix.
      • And while our scale may now be global, collapse appears to happen to both sprawling empires and fledgling kingdoms alike. There is no reason to believe that greater size is armour against societal dissolution. Our tightly-coupled, globalised economic system is, if anything, more likely to make crisis spread.
      • COMPLEXITY: Collapse expert and historian Joseph Tainter has proposed that societies eventually collapse under the weight of their own accumulated complexity and bureaucracy. Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues. However, the returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. After this point, collapse will eventually ensue.
      • Another measure of increasing complexity is called Energy Return on Investment (EROI). This refers to the ratio between the amount of energy produced by a resource relative to the energy needed to obtain it. Like complexity, EROI appears to have a point of diminishing returns. In his book The Upside of Down, the political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon observed that environmental degradation throughout the Roman Empire led to falling EROI from their staple energy source: crops of wheat and alfalfa. The empire fell alongside their EROI. Tainter also blames it as a chief culprit of collapse, including for the Mayan.
      • That's not all. Worryingly, the world is now deeply interconnected and interdependent. In the past, collapse was confined to regions – it was a temporary setback, and people often could easily return to agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyles. For many, it was even a welcome reprieve from the oppression of early states. Moreover, the weapons available during social disorder were rudimentary: swords, arrows and occasionally guns.
      • Today, societal collapse is a more treacherous prospect. The weapons available to a state, and sometimes even groups, during a breakdown now range from biological agents to nuclear weapons. New instruments of violence, such as lethal autonomous weapons, may be available in the near future. People are increasingly specialised and disconnected from the production of food and basic goods. And a changing climate may irreparably damage our ability to return to simple farming practices.
      • We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified. The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.

12/18/2019

  • Ocean waters off West Coast acidifying at twice the rate of global average, NOAA researcher finds: The findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, were the product of a seven-year study led by Emily Osborne, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ocean acidification program.
    • After weighing and photographing each specimen, Osborne was able to use the thickness of the shells to establish a 100-year record of pH levels in the waters of the California Current, which runs along the West Coast.
      PDVHRTJL2JHW5PNNZS4V4JI6YQ.jpg
      • 5. The graph shows the decline from 1900 to 2000 in the concentration of carbonate ions in the waters off California. Carbonate ions are the building blocks used by foraminifera and other shelled marine species to build their shells. As carbon dioxide concentrations have risen in these Pacific Ocean waters due to absorbing excess carbon dioxide emissions and upwelling of carbon dioxide-rich waters from the deep, the carbonate ion concentration has declined and acidity has increased, making it more difficult for marine species to build shells. The inset photos show (a) a typical foraminifera shell; (b) cross section of a shell from 1900 showing thickness of the shell; and (c) a shell from 2000 showing a thinner shell wall. Courtesy/Emily Osborne/NOAA
    • Looking at the chemical composition of the shells, Osborne found that the type of carbon in the shells was indicative of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere, the same greenhouse gas that is driving changes to the climate across Oregon and around the globe.
    • The record also showed evidence of natural variability, she said. The pH levels rose and fell with natural phenomenon like El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a longer-term pattern of warming and cooling ocean waters. Those natural changes will offset effects of ocean acidification in some years, but amplify it in others. “We now know that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation can intensify or alleviate (ocean acidification) in this region,” Osborne said. “For those large swings to also have a human imprint, it’s going to make the extremes more extreme.”
    • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0499-z
  • Australia Records Its Hottest Day. At Least for Now.: A national heat wave pushed high temperatures across the country on Tuesday to an average of 105.6 degrees. Even more heat is in the forecast.
    • A national heat wave, triggered by a confluence of meteorological factors that extends well beyond Australia’s shores, pushed high temperatures across the country on Tuesday to an average of 105.6 degrees, or 40.9 degrees Celsius, breaking the record of 104.5, or 40.3 Celsius, set on Jan. 7, 2013.
    • Prime Minister Scott Morrison generated disapproving headlines on Wednesday after it was reported that he had left Australia for a Hawaii vacation as the authorities raised emergency warnings across the country, fires continued to burn and Australians sweltered.
  • Rainwater in parts of US contains high levels of PFAS chemical, says study: Levels high enough to potentially impact human health and trigger regulatory action, which only targets two of 4,700 variants
    • New data shows that rainwater in some parts of the US contains high enough levels of potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to possibly affect human health and may, if found in drinking water, in some cases be high enough to trigger regulatory action. PFAS chemicals appear in an array of everyday items, such as food packaging, clothing and carpeting. Chemicals in this family are the subject of the film Dark Water, which chronicles the real-life efforts of a lawyer seeking to hold a polluting factory to account in West Virginia.
    • “There were folks not too long ago who felt the atmospheric transport route was not too important,” says Martin Shafer, principal researcher with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data belies that statement.”
  • A Coal Baron Funded Climate Denial as His Company Spiraled Into Bankruptcy:
    • The company, Murray Energy, filed for bankruptcy protection in October, reporting $2.7 billion in debts and more than $8 billion in obligations, in large part to pension and health care plans for workers. But those debts appear to have done little to scale back the spending habits of Mr. Murray, a prominent supporter of President Trump who helped engineer dozens of climate change and environmental rollbacks over the past three years.
    • The company gave $300,000 to Government Accountability & Oversight, a group focused on countering organizations that oppose Trump administration environmental rollbacks. An additional $200,000 went to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that maintains that scientists have not proven that human activity is the main cause of rising emissions. And $130,000 was given to the Heartland Institute, which has sponsored climate-change deniers to speak at United Nations climate change conferences.
  • Fossil Fuel Giants Claim To Support Climate Science, Yet Still Fund Denial: Fourteen oil and gas companies are funding a website that attacks scientists and undermines their work.
    • In the latest example, documents and recordings reviewed by HuffPost show that the Independent Petroleum Association of America has spent almost $2 million a year for the last two years on Energy In Depth, a “research, education and public outreach campaign” that regularly attacks scientists whose research is critical of industry. The campaign has received financial backing from 14 different oil and gas companies including Shell, Occidental Petroleum, BP, Chevron and Halliburton.
  • Investment Bankers Are Now Waging the War on Coal: As UN climate negotiations faltered, bankers on Wall Street brought good news for the climate. What’s even happening?
    • For the most helpful clue, it was best on Sunday not to look to Madrid, where the climate negotiations were wrapping up, but to New York, where a different kind of global governance was unfolding. This weekend, the investment bank Goldman Sachs updated its rules about when and how it would underwrite fossil-fuel projects. Goldman will now refuse to finance oil exploration or drilling in the Arctic, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It will also decline to finance new thermal coal mines, mountaintop-removal mines, or coal-fired power plants.
    • Goldman’s promise not to finance new Arctic oil projects is just as important. For years, student activists have called on schools like Harvard and Yale to divest from fossil-fuel assets, just as universities divested from South African companies during apartheid. (Neither Ivy has yet to do so.) But experts have recognized that divestment from oil-company stocks is the blunt edge of the knife: What will really reshape the economy is divestment from bonds, or corporate debt. The bond market is less liquid and altogether more conservative than the public stock markets. (Just think: It’s possible for you or I to buy a single share of Exxon stock using a smartphone app; buying an Exxon-issued bond is much more challenging.) As the Bloomberg columnist David Fickling has reported, the bond market for some fossil fuels is already drying up: Nearly 80 percent of support for new coal-power projects in Asia comes from governments or state banks.
  • Good news for climate change: India gets out of coal:
    • The reasons for this change are complex and interlocking, but one aspect in particular seems to stand out: The price for solar electricity has been in freefall, to levels so low they were once thought impossible. For example, since 2017, one solar energy company has been generating electricity in the Indian state of Rajasthan at the unheard-of, guaranteed wholesale price of 2.44 rupees per kilowatt-hour, or 3 US cents. (In comparison, the average price for electricity in the United States is presently about 13.19 cents per kilowatt-hour, and some locations in the country pay far more. As recently as 2008, the average homeowner on Block Island, Rhode Island, paid a staggering 61 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, before any other fees or charges—which can nearly double the price. And businesses had it even worse, with some business owners reporting electric bills of as much as $30,000 per month.)

12/16/2019

  • Sales of electric vehicles plummet in Ontario now that province has cancelled rebate: Doug Ford government has gotten in the way of progress towards national target, experts say
    • In the first six months of this year, sales in Ontario were down more than 55 per cent from the same period in 2018, according to data from Electric Mobility Canada. In the second quarter of this year 2,933 electric vehicles were sold in the province, down from 7,110 in the same period last year. Ontario is the only province not seeing increases in sales, year over year. Quebec and British Columbia, which have their own provincial rebates, have long been leading in total sales. Ontario's figures had been increasing on par with theirs until the province's financial incentive disappeared.
  • U.N. Climate Talks End With Few Commitments and a ‘Lost’ Opportunity: In what was widely denounced as one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations, United Nations talks ended early Sunday morning with the United States and other big polluters blocking even a nonbinding measure that would have encouraged countries to adopt more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions next year.
    • [ael: The U.S. is continuing its role as a climate saboteur….]
    • [ael: Trump and McConnell are climate saboteurs, and should be dealt with as such.]
    • “Most of the large emitters were missing in action or obstructive,” said Helen Mountford, a vice president at World Resources Institute. “This reflects how disconnected many national leaders are from the urgency of the science and the demands of their citizens.” [ael: my emphasis]
    • [ael: there's a crisis going on, and the mature countries in the world are trying to deal with out; others are "obstructing". They are saboteurs….]
    • Along with the United States, Australia and Brazil were also singled out for blocking action on other issues. China and India balked at suggestions of more ambitious climate targets next year. [ael: no surprise on Australia — Morrison — and Brazil — Bolsonaro. These "leaders" are also saboteurs.].

12/14/2019

  • World must reach 'peak meat' by 2030 to meet climate change targets, scientists warn: In a letter to The Lancet Planetary Health Journal, they said all but the poorest countries needed to set a time frame for livestock production to stop growing, since the meat and dairy sector is responsible for such a large proportion of emissions.
    • "We're suggesting agriculture transitions to optimal systems, and that's plant-based."
    • The letter said that when grazing land is not required or is unsuitable for horticulture or arable production, it should, where possible, be repurposed by restoring native vegetation such as forest, which acts as a "carbon sink." A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon that it releases, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
    • Scientists agree that CO2 emissions must not exceed 420 billion tonnes before the end of this century, and approximately 720 billion tonnes of CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere to limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius.

12/13/2019

  • Kentucky Gives Voting Rights to Some 140,000 Former Felons: The state’s new Democratic governor said he would ease one of the nation’s strictest policies. Iowa will be alone in barring voting by all felons.
    • ael: hurray for Andy Beshear!
    • The governor said his order did not extend to those who committed violent felonies because some offenses, such as rape and murder, were too heinous to forgive. The order also excludes those who were convicted under federal law or the laws of other states, although they would be able to apply individually for restoration of their rights.
    • Like Kentucky, Virginia bars felons from voting for life unless a governor restores their right, a decades-old restriction that, like similar measures in some other states, was designed at least in part to disenfranchise African-Americans. The state had gradually lowered the barriers to winning restoration, but Mr. McAuliffe effectively removed all obstacles and made restoration automatic for those who had completed their sentences.
    • “It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Kentucky,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project. “It’s one thing for the governor to sign a paper saying they have the right to vote, but how does that work? Does everyone get a piece of paper in the mail? Does anyone describe to you how to register to vote?”

12/12/2019

  • It’s a Vast, Invisible Climate Menace. We Made It Visible.: Immense amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders.
    • Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration, either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane, a review of regulatory filings, meeting minutes and attendance logs shows. These local companies, along with oil-industry lobby groups that represent the world’s largest energy companies, are fighting rules that would force them to more aggressively fix emissions like these.
    • Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.
    • Tim Doty, a former senior official at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who is trained in infrared leak detection, examined and helped analyze the findings. “That’s a crazy amount of emissions,” he said. “It takes a little bit of investigative work, but with an infrared camera, you can see it.”
    • Oil and gas companies were committed to driving down emissions “while delivering affordable, reliable energy to American families,” said Howard Feldman, senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, a major industry lobby group. Its members believed that regulations should be improved, however, to provide clarity for businesses, avoid duplicating state rules and drive industry innovation, he said.
    • The findings address the mystery behind rising levels of methane in the atmosphere. Methane levels have soared since 2007 for reasons that still aren’t fully understood. But fracking natural-gas production, which accelerated just as atmospheric methane levels jumped, is a prime suspect.
    • “It’s increasingly clear that fossil fuel production has dramatically increased global methane emissions,” said Robert Howarth, an earth system scientist at Cornell University and author of a study estimating that North American shale gas production may be responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.
    • According to Texas regulatory records, DCP has reported more than 250 unpermitted emissions events this year in the Permian Basin and is among the area’s bigger emitters. State rules allow facilities to report irregular emissions without penalties. Sarah Sandberg, a spokeswoman for DCP, which operates several pipelines and almost 50 gas processing plants nationwide, said she had “many questions regarding the accuracy of your assessment and assumptions.” She did not respond to repeated follow-ups. Phillips 66 declined to comment.
  • How Greta Thunberg is using her fame to pressure world leaders to act on climate:
    • “The changes required are still nowhere in sight. The politics needed does not exist today, despite what you hear from world leaders,” she said, criticizing the lofty rhetoric and distant goals from countries here, which have yet to result in concrete promises. “I still believe the biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs make it look like real action is happening, when in fact, almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative PR.”
    • She had good timing, undertaking her strikes at a time when the United States had made clear it would withdraw from the Paris accord and climate impacts were becoming more clear. She also had a simple message — “listen to the science” — that people can grasp. In addition, media coverage and the ability of social media to amplify her message helped spur the Fridays for Future movement around the globe.
    • On Monday in Madrid, Thunberg and another high-profile German activist, Luisa Neubauer, yielded the stage at a climate panel composed of other young people who had received a fraction of the coverage. “We are privileged, and our stories have been told over and over again,” she told the overflowing crowd, saying she felt a “moral duty” to use her global reach to spotlight others wrestling firsthand with the impacts of climate change, some of whom had worked for years to gain attention. “It is not our stories that need to be told and listened to. It is the others, especially the people from the global south and indigenous communities.”
    • “This is what I want you to focus on,” Thunberg said. “How do you react to these numbers without feeling at least some level of panic? How do you respond to the fact that basically nothing is being done about this without feeling the slightest bit of anger? And how do you communicate this without sounding alarmist? I would really like to know.”
    • Related: Teen activist says leaders not ‘mature enough’ to take action on climate change: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”
      • “You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake,” she said. “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is.”
      • However, on Twitter, Greta asked to be removed from the list of finalists, noting that most people would have to fly to the awards ceremony. “All finalists are to be flown in from all over the world, to be a part of a ceremony, has no connection with reality,” she wrote. “Our generation will never be able to fly (among other things), other than for emergencies. Because the adult generations have used up all our carbon budget.”
      • “Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury,” she said this week. “It is the suffering of many that pay for the luxuries of few.”
  • Time to speak the unspeakable: It is time not only to imagine the unimaginable, but to speak it: that the world economy, civilization, and maybe our very survival as a species, are on the line. And that it is past time to act.
    • There are only three motives for hazarding human civilization in such a fashion: greed, malice and ignorance. Either the rewards are so great that fossil executives are prepared to risk cooking their own grandchildren, or they are just plain blind to the risks. Since they are largely technical people, the latter does not ring true, as the archives of leading oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil, exposed in court, reveal they have known exactly what they are doing to the Planet for nearly half a century – and have not only ignored it, but worked assiduously to deceive humanity about its likely fate while they ramped up their output of carbon.
    • As I have written elsewhere, the scientific ‘best guess’ how many human lives Collapse will cost ranges from about half of humanity to well over 90 per cent. The actual number is not knowable because human behaviour, in the form of war, cannot be foretold. However, the process begins with climate-induced famines and global water crises – both already evident at a regional level – leading to mass refugee tsunamis and multiplying conflicts. Compared with the Holocaust of World War II, (one of the worst intentional crimes in human history) the toll of lives taken is likely to be around 1000 times greater.
    • As things stand, most experts still believe there is a narrow window to avert this fate by universal, agreed action – but it is closing rapidly. Many, like Prof. Bendell, think it is already closed, though they refrain from saying so publicly, for many reasons. They do not believe it will happen in the near-term – as do the so-called ‘catastrophists’ – but that the process, once set in motion, becomes impossible to halt as it gains momentum. The impact will fall chiefly on the second and third generations hence.

12/11/2019

  • Climate Change Is Ravaging the Arctic, Report Finds: “If I had gotten a report card like this as a kid, I would have been grounded,” Dr. Perovich said. “It’s not showing much improvement at all. Things are getting worse.”
    • “The very old ice that’s been around for more than four years used to be 33 percent of the ice cover and now it’s 1 percent,” Dr. Perovich said. “One way to think about that is, when we look at the area that the old ice covered back in 1985 it was a little bit bigger than the United States east of the Mississippi River. And all that’s left now is Maine.”
    • “The way that the lower 48 relies on, say, citrus or grapes or the potato as garden food sources, the Bering Sea, when the sea ice comes, it is our garden,” said Mellisa Johnson, a guest editor on the report and a member of the Bering Sea Elders Group, which is made up of 38 tribal elders from the region. “It is our way of life.”
    • But what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Permafrost sequesters twice as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide as is currently in the atmosphere. As that ground thaws it releases that carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change. Researchers say that if too much permafrost thaws it will create a self-reinforcing cycle wherein thawing permafrost will lead to still more thawing permafrost, which in turn will make climate change worse. Recent observations of carbon flows in Alaskan permafrost have found that more carbon is being released than stored.
    • “The key question really remains as to whether the measurements in Alaska over a several year period are representative of the broader Arctic system of other regions in the Arctic where permafrost exists,” said Matthew Druckenmiller, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the report’s editors. “If, in fact, it is, then we are seeing signs that the Arctic is really beginning to play that role as a large-scale feedback to the climate system.”
  • The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback: Report finds sweeping changes underway across the Arctic
  • Time’s Person of the Year is its youngest ever: Greta Thunberg, the teen climate activist: “She became the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet this year, coming from essentially nowhere to lead a worldwide movement,” Time Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal said on NBC’s “Today” show.
    • Time’s other finalists were three people at the center of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump: the president himself, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint helped set the impeachment inquiry in motion.
    • He marveled on “Today” at Thunberg’s rapid rise from little-known “solo protester” to beacon of change in the past year. She spent last summer sitting alone outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign declaring her “school strike for climate."
    • Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also lauded the choice, noting Thunberg’s words that “change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
  • New Material Captures Carbon Dioxide – Is Sustainable, Low-Cost & Efficient: In a joint research study from Sweden, scientists from Chalmers University of Technology and Stockholm University have developed a new material for capturing carbon dioxide. The new material offers many benefits — it is sustainable, has a high capture rate, and has low operating costs. The research has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
    • The new material is a bio-based hybrid foam, infused with a high amount of CO2-adsorbing ‘zeolites’ — microporous aluminosilicates. This material has been shown to have very promising properties. The porous, open structure of the material gives it a great ability to adsorb the carbon dioxide.
    • The researchers’ work has yielded important knowledge and points the way for further development of sustainable carbon capture technology. Currently, the leading CCS technology uses ‘amines’, suspended in a solution. This method has several problems — amines are inherently environmentally unfriendly, larger and heavier volumes are required, and the solution causes corrosion in pipes and tanks. Additionally, a lot of energy is required to separate the captured carbon dioxide from the amine solution for reuse. The material now presented avoids all of these problems. In future applications, filters of various kinds could be easily manufactured.
  • UN climate talks sputter on carbon market disputes: Connecting the world’s new carbon emissions trading schemes remains a priority for countries struggling to meet their Paris Agreement targets.
    • So far, a deal to craft an international trading market to help reduce the carbon pollution driving up temperatures has proven elusive to the legions of largely technical experts gathered at the COP25 conference in the Spanish capital since last week. Negotiators acknowledged that translating world leaders' lofty promises to protect the climate into an actionable set of rules by the end of the conference on Friday will be a daunting task.
    • “They’re trying to escalate here, which is not the best sign,” said Brad Schallert, deputy director of international climate cooperation for the World Wildlife Fund.
  • College Republicans launch campaign calling for GOP to take action on climate change: College Republicans across the country are calling on the GOP to back a conservative climate action plan, arguing that not doing so will hurt both the future of the earth and the Republican party.
    • The group, co-founded by 25 current or former College Republican chairs representing states across the country, is focused on lobbying Republicans to back the Carbon Dividends plan. The group’s leaders claim the plan would cut carbon emissions in half by 2035 if implemented in 2020, and they said it would exceed the requirements the U.S. agreed to under the Paris Climate agreement before President Trump backed out in 2017.
    • Although the young Republicans don’t support the Green New Deal, which they argue is not economically viable, they also reject the GOP’s hesitation to talk about climate change and the Republican talking point that innovation will solve the issues facing the environment.

12/10/2019

  • Arctic Report Card 2019: Extreme Ice Loss, Dying Species as Global Warming Worsens: For indigenous communities on the Bering Sea, a way of life is at risk as climate change hits fish populations and ricochets through ecosystems.
    • As the Arctic warms roughly twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the effects are reverberating far beyond any single species. Massive systems—from the sea ice and permafrost to the jet stream—are beginning to behave in unexpected ways.
    • As the Arctic sea ice continues its downward trend, it's expected that within the next few decades, the Earth will see an ice-free Arctic in the summer, said Meier. That projection alone is significant. Before 2007, the models projected that an ice-free summer could possibly happen by the end of the century. "I'm 50 years old," Meier said. "I look at that and I think, I'll be long gone when that happens, but maybe my grandkids will see it." Now, since the losses in 2007 and the years since, that has changed. "There's some wide variation, but the better models converge around the 2040 to 2050 range" for an ice-free summer, he said. "That's a half century earlier—something I may live to see," he said. "It's a really remarkable and rapid change."
  • Extreme weather patterns are raising the risk of a global food crisis, and climate change will make this worse: Multiple 'breadbaskets’ could fail at the same time, research shows
    • Extreme weather patterns associated with heat waves and droughts are raising the risks of simultaneous harvest failures of vital crops worldwide such as wheat, maize and soybeans, two studies published Monday found. This is pushing the world closer to the edge of potential food price spikes, associated social unrest and food shortages.
    • A key conclusion of one of the studies is that simultaneous heat extremes and resulting decreases in food production are possible in locations separated by thousands of miles. When particular weather patterns, known as “wave number 5” and “wave number 7” for the number of jet stream peaks or ridges, as well as dips or troughs, are present, the probability of simultaneous heat extremes in these regions increases by a factor of up to 20 for the most severe heat events, the study found. This is the case when either of these two extreme weather patterns dominate the atmosphere.
    • “We found an underexplored vulnerability in the food system: when these global scale wind patterns are in place, we see a twenty-fold increase in the risk of simultaneous heatwaves in major crop producing regions,” Kai Kornhuber, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University and at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a news release. “During these events there actually is a global structure in the otherwise quite chaotic circulation.”
    • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0600-z.epdf
  • Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say: That’s according to 26 separate satellite measurements and 89 scientists who have produced them.
    • The sheet’s total losses nearly doubled each decade, from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to an average now of 254 billion tons annually. Since 1992, nearly 4 trillion tons of Greenland ice have entered the ocean, the new analysis found, equivalent to roughly a centimeter of global sea-level rise.
    • “Around the planet, just 1 centimeter of sea-level rise brings another 6 million people into seasonal, annual floods,” said Andrew Shepherd, a University of Leeds professor who co-led the massive collaboration with NASA researcher Erik Ivins.
    • The recent Greenland losses, the experts suggest, match a more dire sea-level projection outlined by the United Nations’ chief climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Under that high-end scenario, Greenland could contribute about 16 centimeters, or around half a foot, to ocean levels by 2100. “What that means is that really, the midrange scenario becomes what was previously the upper scenario, and they will have to invent a new upper scenario, because one currently doesn’t exist,” Shepherd said.
    • The IMBIE group, which has been trying to collate scientific results in this way for about six years now, has done the same analysis for Antarctica. It found rapidly increasing losses there as well.
  • Are we already beyond climate tipping points? – A MAHB Dialogue with Paleo-Climatologist Andrew Glikson:
    • GH – What do you see as some viable strategies for decreasing our dependency on these polluting forms of energy?
      • AG – There are now nearly eight billion humans living on Earth, who are still largely dependent on coal, oil, and other polluting, fossil forms of energy. Science and technology have now developed sources of energy such as solar, wind, wave, hydro-power, hydrogen and so on allowing civilization to replace fossil fuels and carbon emissions, if it wants to survive. CO2 draw-down methods are essential for lowering the dangerous greenhouse levels in the atmosphere, which are generating amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans.
    • GH – What troubles you the most about the trends you are seeing in the science?
      • AG – There is hardly any future for many species and for human civilization under mean global temperatures of more than 2 degrees Celsius, let alone under more than 4 degrees Celsius, which is where we are heading according to the IPCC under business-as-usual emission trajectories. In the meantime, too many members of the species appear to be more concerned with the World Cup than with Planetary survival.
    • GH – What can we do as individuals to address these climate issues, and contribute to a more positive future?
      • AG – We are facing a global climate crisis and the possible demise of civilization. Individuals need to support and vote-in political forces committed to abrupt cuts in carbon emissions and to alternative energy sources – solar, wind, wave, hydrogen, battery storage and, not least, CO2 draw-down techniques – so-called negative emissions. We will not survive what we have unleashed unless we stand together and demand urgent remedial action from our governments. Time is running out!
  • When Drug Side Effects Pose Real Dangers: The rule of thumb in medicine — first, do no harm — has as its corollary that the expected benefits of treatment should outweigh its potential risks.
    • According to Timothy O’Shea, a clinical pharmacist who writes about prescription drugs, “Each year an estimated 4.5 million Americans visit a physician’s office or emergency room because of side effects related to their prescription medications.”
  • When a DNA Test Says You’re a Younger Man, Who Lives 5,000 Miles Away: After a bone marrow transplant, a man with leukemia found that his donor’s DNA traveled to unexpected parts of his body. A crime lab is now studying the case.
    • Four years later, with Mr. Long in remission and back at work, Ms. Romero’s experiment persisted, aided by her crime lab colleagues. Within four months of the procedure, Mr. Long’s blood had been replaced by his donor’s blood. Swabs collected from his lip, cheek and tongue showed that these also contained his donor’s DNA, with the percentages rising and falling over the years. Of the samples collected, only his chest and head hair were unaffected. The most unexpected part was that four years after the procedure, the DNA in his semen had been entirely replaced by his donor’s.
    • Similar scenarios could also create confusion around a victim’s identity — and in fact it has, said Yongbin Eom, a visiting research scholar at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification. In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.

12/9/2019 — Clare Leaper died today

  • The no-flush movement: the unexpected rise of the composting toilet: We squander masses of clean water flushing away our own waste instead of using it as fertiliser. But a lavatorial eco revolution has now begun
    • If you’ve been to a festival, gone on a rural getaway or spent any time with eco-minded people in the past few years, you may have noticed a small revolution taking place in lavatories around the UK. For those to whom chucking litres of clean drinking water down the toilet on each flush seems wildly at odds with attempts to protect the environment and slow the climate emergency, compost toilets are increasingly making sense. The idea is simple: treat human waste just as other organic matter – in a not dissimilar way to how kitchen waste is composted.
    • “The word waste doesn’t exist in nature,” says Fin Jordão, a biologist and compost toilet expert from the Centre for Alternative Technology in Powys, Wales, who has been one of the UK’s leading champions of the idea. “Waste is not a word fit for the 21st century and the ecological society we’re trying to build.”
    • But the environmental cost is growing. In the UK, flushing the loo accounts for nearly a third of household water consumption. We use drinking-quality water in our toilets, and spend energy and resources on cleaning it afterwards. Water treatment is responsible for about 1% of UK greenhouse gases.
    • A recent article on the scholarly current affairs site JSTOR Daily described how before the development of an efficient sewer network in Europe, the streets overflowed with disease-ridden filth, because nobody could see the value in human compost. Europe’s arable land was rich and fertile. In Japan, by contrast, where land was less fertile, humanure or “night soil” was so highly valued that when the price soared disputes broke out over who had the right to collect it. In Osaka, writes Lina Zeldovich, where boats came to the city to collect night soil, “landlords had the rights to their tenants’ solid waste.” Some desperate farmers resorted to stealing human faeces.
    • Noe-Hays is mostly interested in repurposing urine. “That’s where most of the fertiliser is.” Urine is particularly rich in phosphorus, a vital component of manufactured fertiliser that is currently mined from phosphate rock, a finite resource, so focusing on liquid waste is a good first step. “Urine is easier to capture and transport, store and treat,” he says. Solid waste needs to be treated over a long period before it can be used.
  • How a closed-door meeting shows farmers are waking up on climate change: Perdue, Vilsack and leading agricultural groups gathered in a Maryland barn to talk about the farm-country issue that dare not speak its name.
    • The meeting last June in a wood-beamed barn in Newburg, Md., an hour due south of Washington, had all the makings of a secret conclave. The guest list was confidential. No press accounts were allowed. The topic was how to pivot American agriculture to help combat climate change — an issue so politically toxic that the current administration routinely shies away from promoting crucial government research on the issue. But this meeting represented a change. It was hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, a group made up of the heavyweights in American agriculture. It brought together three secretaries of agriculture, including the current one, Sonny Perdue, among an A-list of about 100 leaders that included the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation — a longtime, powerful foe of federal action on climate — and CEOs of major food companies, green groups and anti-hunger advocates.
    • Even a year ago, such a meeting would have been improbable, if not impossible. But the long-held resistance to talking about climate change among largely conservative farmers and ranchers and the lobbying behemoths that represent them is starting to shift. The veil of secrecy attested to just how sensitive the topic remains, but over the course of the two-day gathering, the group coalesced around big ideas like the need to pay farmers to use their land to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, participants told POLITICO. “It was a pretty serious meeting,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat who serves on the House Agriculture Committee, and attended the gathering. “It was led by commodity groups and farm groups that didn’t waste a minute debating whether there’s a problem.”
    • Farmers have long felt unfairly blamed for all manner of environmental ills, from drinking water contamination in Iowa to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s impossible for many to reckon with the fact that farming the land they love using widely-accepted growing practices could result in such destruction. It all feels like another attack on their way of life and their livelihood.
  • Activist Thunberg warns governments in Madrid that 'change is coming': Teen activist Greta Thunberg took her call for bold action to tackle climate change to a U.N. summit in Spain on Friday, warning world leaders that a growing youth-led protest movement meant they could no longer hide.
    • “The current world leaders are betraying us and we will not let that happen anymore,” Thunberg said in a brief speech to the protesters, some of whom had chanted “We Love You Greta.”
    • “We are really gaining momentum, we are getting bigger and bigger and our voices are being heard more and more, but of course that does not translate into political action,” she said.
  • Americans broadly accept climate science, but many are fuzzy on the details: Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change.
    • The rising alarm is one of the poll’s most dramatic findings. In just five years, the percentage of people calling climate change a “crisis” has jumped from 23 percent to 38 percent. More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that humans are influencing the climate. The overwhelming majority of them said it’s not too late for society to come up with solutions, but a third of adults who say humans are causing climate change don’t think they can personally make a difference, the poll found. [ael: shaky on the details….]
    • The poll suggests that many Americans remain early on the learning curve when it comes to knowing what’s causing climate change and global warming. For example, 43 percent of adults and 57 percent of teens cited “plastic bottles and bags” as a “major” contributor to climate change, which is incorrect. That response may echo a recent burst of news media attention to plastic pollution in the oceans.
    • Jamieson said television meteorologists have been more likely in recent years to cite climate change as a factor in extreme weather events. She noted that the data on global temperature increases are more abstract relative to big storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and so on. “You’re seeing the news media attach the language to things that are evocative and dramatic and have real effects on human lives,” she said.
    • “Americans in increasing numbers are coming to understand that climate change is real, that it’s human-caused, that there’s an overwhelming consensus among the experts that human-caused climate change is happening, that it’s bad, that it’s harmful to people, not just plants, penguins and polar bears,” Maibach said. “And there are things we can do. This is not like a meteor toward Earth — we actually have some options here.”
    • The poll suggests that educators, the news media and science communicators have plenty of opportunity to improve public understanding of climate science. Among teenagers, 54 percent say they have learned “a lot” or “a moderate amount” in school about the causes of climate change, while 46 percent have learned about ways to reduce its effects.
    • Two-thirds say they disapprove of the way President Trump is handling climate change — a slightly higher rate of disapproval than for any other issue measured in the poll, including health care, immigration, gun policy and the economy.
    • She said people seeking information will run into echo chambers: “I kind of feel like you can find anything to support your point of view. You can always find something to support what you think and negate what your counterpart might be saying.”
    • Many people are making changes in their lives. The poll found that 53 percent of adults say they’ve taken actions to reduce their carbon footprints — including about 6 in 10 Democrats and 4 in 10 Republicans. Among those taking action, 38 percent volunteered they are recycling while 37 percent said they are driving less. Roughly a quarter (26 percent) said they are using less electricity in their home, while 17 percent mentioned driving a hybrid or more fuel-efficient vehicle. Only 4 percent volunteered they are eating less meat or none at all.
  • Nestlé cannot claim bottled water is 'essential public service', court rules: Michigan’s second-highest court rules in favor of township in case that could damage company’s effort to privatize water
    • If it is to carry out such plans, then it will need to be legally recognized as a public water source that provides an essential public service. The Michigan environmental attorney Jim Olson, who did not represent Osceola township but has previously battled Nestlé in court, said any claim that the Swiss multinational is a public water utility “is ludicrous”.
    • “The circuit court’s conclusion that [Nestlé’s] commercial water bottling operation is an ‘essential public service’ is clearly erroneous,” the judges wrote. “Other than in areas with no other source of water, bottled water is not essential.”
  • Arctic Council highlights Arctic Ocean acidification at UN climate talks: “Protecting the marine environment and animals is of utmost importance to us,” says ICC’s Lisa Koperqualuk
    • Ocean acidification is taking place in the Arctic Ocean at a rate that’s about two times higher than elsewhere in the world, due to the combination of cold water, sea ice melt and input of freshwater from melting glaciers, those attending the panel heard.
    • Participants in the panel also included four scientists, who spoke about how the ocean is heading to a state of acidification that hasn’t been seen in 55 million years, since the time of a mass extinction event in the oceans.
    • “The world’s small window of opportunity to address climate change is closing rapidly,” Espinosa said. “We must urgently deploy all the tools of multilateral cooperation to make the talks the launch pad for more climate ambition.”
  • Youth urge adults to stop 'acting like children' on climate change: “I came to Madrid because the adults are acting like children,” he said, lamenting their failure so far to curb planet-heating emissions and rising temperatures. “Please listen to us, please listen to the science,” he pleaded.
    • David R. Boyd, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said that when the initial U.N. convention on climate change was signed in 1992, about four-fifths of the world’s energy supply came from fossil fuels, and that share had not dropped since. “Children, I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart - we are failing you,” he said. “We need urgent, rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society in order to address the climate crisis.”
    • “Children have called out the adult world (on climate change)… because this is a gross injustice to young people,” she said. “It’s not fair that we have condemned children so far to have that worry and that fear.”

12/7/2019 — a day that will go down in infamy….

  • Victoria Falls dries to a trickle after worst drought in a century: One of southern Africa’s biggest tourist attractions has seen an unprecedented decline this dry season, fuelling climate change fears
    • Harald Kling, a hydrologist at engineering firm Poyry and a Zambezi river expert, said climate science dealt in decades, not particular years, “so it’s sometimes difficult to say this is because of climate change because droughts have always occurred”. “If they become more frequent, then you can start saying: OK, this may be climate change.” He said early climate models had predicted more frequent dry years in the Zambezi basin, but that “what was surprising was that it [drought] has been so frequent” – the last drought was only three years ago. As the river got hotter, 437m cubic metres of water were evaporating every second.
    • Richard Beilfuss, head of the International Crane Foundation, who has studied the Zambezi for the past three decades, believed climate change was delaying the monsoon, “concentrating rain in bigger events, which are then much harder to store, and a much longer, excruciating dry season”.
  • Oceans losing oxygen at unprecedented rate, experts warn: Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish at risk from spread of ‘dead zones’, say scientists
    • Grethel Aguilar, the acting director general of the IUCN, said the health of the oceans should be a key consideration for the talks. “As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray,” she said. “The potentially dire effects on fisheries and vulnerable coastal communities mean that the decisions made at the conference are even more crucial.”
    • The problem of dead zones has been known about for decades, but little has been done to tackle it. Farmers rarely bear the brunt of the damage, which mainly affects fishing fleets and coastal areas. Two years ago, the meat industry in the US was found to be responsible for a massive dead zone measuring more than 8,000 sq miles in the Gulf of Mexico.
    • A study published at COP25 by Greenpeace International showed that restoring marine ecosystems could play a major role in tackling climate chaos.
    • Related
      Simulated-evolution-of-the-models.jpg
    • Image based on this work
    • Possible Data set

12/6/2019

  • Jane Fonda on joining the climate fight: 'It's back to the barricades': Veteran actor and activist has been arrested four times after being inspired by Greta Thunberg and disgusted by Trump
    • The American actor and political activist – who has been protesting about inaction over the climate crisis at the US Capitol every Friday – has been arrested four times and kept overnight once. Her lawyers have helped her avoid serious charges. But she says the acts of civil disobedience have pulled her out of a depression she sunk into after Donald Trump took office.
    • Trump has belittled Fonda’s cause at recent campaign rallies, reminding his supporters that she was arrested decades ago when she was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam war. He also brought up Fonda’s 1972 visit to North Vietnam, which earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and still taints her reputation, especially on the right.
    • She was inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who she first read about in a book by Naomi Klein. Because of her Asperger’s diagnosis, Greta is “unlike most of us, she’s not affected by compromise and you know, being popular or what other people might think”, Fonda said. “She can’t learn something horrific and then go about her business.” Thunberg, who began a worldwide movement with her Friday strikes from school, fell into a deep depression over the environmental crisis when she was 11.
    • “We’re holding grief in our bodies because we know 2.9 billion fewer birds exist in North America than in 1970, because we see pictures of polar bears starving, because we know that tens of millions of people are forced to leave where they live and forests are burning. We, unlike Greta, we go about our lives, but that’s lodged in our bodies. And I think it causes this existential angst,” she said.
    • On the Thursdays before the protests, she features experts on Facebook Live to discuss detailed impacts of the climate crisis – including how it can exacerbate global unrest. She said she generally understood the problem but wanted to learn more about the specifics and who is to blame. Her plan is to help activate people who already care about climate change but don’t yet grasp its severity.
  • Climate crisis is 'challenge of civilisation', says pope: Pontiff calls on COP 25 leaders to show political will to safeguard healthy planet
    • The climate emergency is a “challenge of civilisation” requiring sweeping changes to economic systems, but political leaders have not done enough, the pope has said in a message to governments meeting at the annual climate summit in Madrid. “We must seriously ask ourselves if there is the political will to allocate with honesty, responsibility and courage, more human, financial and technological resources [to the climate crisis],” he said, in the pontifical message, which was welcomed by activists. [ael: i.e. "maturity", a la Greta Thunberg.]
  • Mercer family backs away from public climate denial: For years, the Mercer Family Foundation has bankrolled efforts to question climate science with millions of dollars in donations to groups such as the Heartland Institute, CO2 Coalition and Cato Institute.
    • The Mercer Family Foundation's most recent public tax records from 2018, which were first obtained by CNBC, don't include any donations to those groups, unlike previous years.
    • But there could be more to the story. Last year, the Mercer Family Foundation — which is backed by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family — donated $8 million to Donors Trust, a Koch-linked group that allows donors to anonymously fund conservative groups, the returns show. That was a sharp increase from the $500,000 the Mercers donated in 2017 and more than the $2.5 million they donated in 2016, tax records show.
    • "Donors Trust was built for exactly this purpose, to be able to hide the trail of breadcrumbs between donors and recipients of those grants," said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center. "It's been called the 'dark money ATM' for a reason, it functions as an anonymizing body for these wealthy donors to hide their trail."
  • Climate change protests will surround the World Bank and block traffic Friday morning: The rally will be led by the same coalition that organized a September event in which protesters set up blockades at 15 downtown intersections throughout the morning and chained themselves to the hull of a boat blocks from the White House — ultimately culminating in 32 arrests.
    • Friday’s demonstration, which is part of the national student-led Youth Climate Strike, will then converge with activists’ weekly Fire Drill Friday protest, at which actress Jane Fonda has become a fixture. The groups, joining at Franklin Square about 11 a.m., then will march to an undisclosed “bank investment firm” to symbolize their opposition to financial institutions’ support of the fossil fuel industry.
  • Fires, floods and free parking: California’s unending fight against climate change: Life in Southern California, once as mild and predictable as the weather, is being transformed as the climate grows hotter, drier and in some regions windier, fueling more intense wildfires, deadly mudslides and prolonged extreme drought.
    • The changing natural world is in turn forcing a fundamental social reckoning, altering the choice of crops on some of the nation’s most bountiful farms, erasing the certainty of electrical power in some of its wealthiest homes and exposing the limits of environmental activism among some of its most liberal voters.
    • Since 1895, the average temperature in Santa Barbara County has warmed by 2.3 degrees Celsius, according to The Post's analysis. Neighboring Ventura County has heated up even more rapidly. With an average temperature increase of 2.6 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, Ventura ranks as the fastest-warming county in the Lower 48 states.
      map-california-medium.jpg?v=20
    • Across California, the growing heat and loss of moisture threatens the iconic coastal redwood forests and the Joshua trees of the southern desert. Bird populations have been ravaged by drought, with several once-prominent desert habitats losing 43 percent of their species in the past century, according to a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Offshore, the warming ocean has depleted once-expansive kelp forests around the Channel Islands and has thrown oyster, crab and urchin harvests into disarray.
    • But the government here has bumped up against local business interests, from downtown retailers and restaurants to the oil industry, that oppose more environmental regulation and even such seemingly minor changes to civic life as a reduction in downtown parking. Those interests are often decisive in determining local elections.
  • Hair Dyes And Straighteners Linked To Higher Cancer Risk, Especially For Black Women: New research raises concern about the safety of permanent hair dye and chemical hair straighteners, especially among African American women. The study was published Wednesday in the International Journal of Cancer.
  • Reindeer near Santa's hometown need help to survive a warming climate: Climate change is threatening one of the famous symbols of Christmas: Santa's reindeer. Over the past 20 years, wild reindeer and caribou populations have declined by more than two million.
    • Andte Gaup-Juuso is one of the Sami people, an indigenous group that has been herding reindeer since the dawn of time. He says the climate in Lapland is changing. "If it's warm weather, then snow's going to be — it melts, and next day, it freezes," he told Phillips.
    • The result is reindeer dying. A big die-off was discovered on the arctic islands of Svalbard last summer. The huge wild herds of caribou — the same species as reindeer — that have roamed for years across Alaska and northern Canada have been reduced by half, according to a recent government report. Gaup-Juuso said the reindeer are looking for lichen, a mossy plant that they dig down through the snow to get at. But the repeated thawing and re-freezing means they can't dig through the ice to get to the food.
  • NKU joins in carbon neutrality effort, becomes first KY organization to join Cincinnati 2030 District: Northern Kentucky University underscores its commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by joining the Cincinnati 2030 District, which is part of an international network of cities developing a new model for urban sustainability. NKU is the first organization in Kentucky to join this collective.
    • “Our sustainability strategy has six main goals, one of which is to ‘expand external partnerships that inform NKU sustainability efforts and strengthen our regional impact.’ This partnership shows our support for sustainability and that we remain dedicated to our 2050 commitment,” said Tiffany Budd, sustainability operations coordinator at NKU. “It’s an honor to be a member of an exceptional cohort of like-minded organizations with a collective goal of creating a more efficient and healthier environment for all generations to live and work in our community.”
  • Will Buffalo Become a Climate Change Haven?:
    • Robles may not have known it when she moved in, but Buffalo is unusually well-insulated against climate change. Rising temperatures have yet to produce more heat waves or extreme rainfall in Western New York. Experts say the region’s cool climate and ample fresh water could make it an attractive destination as the planet heats up. And Buffalo has room to grow — the city’s population has dropped by half over the last 70 years of industrial decline.
    • These facts have not gone unnoticed. In his 2019 State of the City address, the mayor dubbed Buffalo a “Climate Refuge City.” Civic leaders are hopeful that the coming wave of climate refugees will revive Buffalo, filling its vacant lots and abandoned storefronts. “Buffalo is stepping up and preparing to welcome this new type of refugee,” said the city’s mayor, Byron Brown. “We believe that we can accommodate people who have experienced displacement due to harsh weather and natural disaster.”
    • “With climate change, the world is going to suck, but Buffalo may suck less.”
    • “The way I described it at a meeting once was, ‘With climate change, the world is going to suck, but Buffalo may suck less,’” he said. “We may not only be able to adapt. We may actually thrive as a region in a world where the climate is changing.”
    • In September of 2018, Harvard climate adaptation expert Jesse Keenan told The Guardian that, as the planet warmed, Americans might find refuge in northern cities, naming Duluth and Buffalo. The article caught the eye of Mayor Brown, who named Buffalo a “Climate Refuge City” in his February 2019 State of the City address. …. “I heard that line, and I was waiting for something else to come out of his comment, and there was nothing,” Vermette said. “There is no initiative by the city. There is no embracing what we’ve done here. It was just a thing to say.”
    • “You can’t just declare yourself a climate refuge, you know. You’ve got to work and earn it,” he said. “I could declare myself a millionaire, but the bank would not cash my checks accordingly. I would need to earn it.”
    • “We needed to leave Florida and find a new home for our startup, and I had been doing a little research to try to figure out what is going to be the safest place in the country to live in the future,” she said. “That was one of the initial things that they told us about — the research on Buffalo being recommended as a safe haven for climate change.” [ael: there are no safe havens…]
    • Keenan, the Harvard climate adaptation expert, said Buffalo could become another example of climate gentrification, a phenomenon already underway in Miami, for example, where property values are rising faster in high-elevation, low-income neighborhoods that are better protected against sea-level rise. Keenan said that climate gentrification exists on both the small and large scale. [ael: "climate gentrification" — Jesus Fucking Christ — I hope that Jesus won't mind that ejaculation. In fact, I hope that he'll be as pissed as I am to contemplate that phrase.]

12/5/2019

  • Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change: “Things are getting worse,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, which on Tuesday issued its annual state of the global climate report, concluding a decade of what it called exceptional global heat. “It’s more urgent than ever to proceed with mitigation.”
    • But reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change will require drastic measures, Dr. Taalas said. “The only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels in power production, industry and transportation,” he said.
    • In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany and other institutions warned that the acceleration of ice loss and other effects of climate change have brought the world “dangerously close” to abrupt and irreversible changes, or tipping points. Among these, the researchers said, were the collapse of at least part of the West Antarctic ice sheet — which itself could eventually raise sea levels by four feet or more — or the loss of the Amazon rainforest. “In our view, the consideration of tipping points helps to define that we are in a climate emergency,” they wrote.
    • Yet a growing number of studies have shown the influence of global warming in many disasters. Heat waves in Europe in June and July, extreme rainfall in Texas during Tropical Storm Imelda in September, the drought that precipitated the “Day Zero” water crisis in Cape Town in 2018 are among many events shown to have been made more likely, more intense, or both, by climate change.
    • Using satellite data, a 2018 study found that global sea level rise is now about 4.5 millimeters a year, or a little less than one-fifth of an inch. The rate is increasing by about a 10th of a millimeter a year. “We knew the rate of sea level rise was increasing, but we had difficulty detecting that,” said Steven Nerem, a University of Colorado researcher and lead author of the study.
    • Amid the long term increase in ice-sheet melting there have been some exceptional periods, including this summer in Greenland, when heat from Europe spread north, resulting in temperatures as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Overall this year, Greenland had a net ice loss of about 350 billion tons, about 20 percent more than the average in recent years and enough to add one millimeter to sea levels by itself.
  • Birds are shrinking. These scientists say it’s a consequence of global warming.
    • David Willard, a Field Museum ornithologist, has measured the Windy City’s dead birds since 1978. Data from his calipers and scales reveal decades-long trends in bird bodies: Their legs, on average, are growing shorter. They have lost weight. Their wings are getting slightly longer.
    • These changes are present in nearly all of the species he measured, according to a study of 70,716 bird specimens from almost 40 years published Wednesday in the journal Ecology Letters. Morphing birds, Willard and his colleagues say, reflect a changing climate.
    • Simon Griffith, an ecologist at Macquarie University in Australia who was not a member of the research team, said it was “just amazing” that a single scientist measured such an extensive collection. “It reduces the noise in the data-set,” which he said was more standardized in methodology and geology than previous studies that suggest climate change influences bird size.
    • From 1978 to 2016, birds on average lost 2.6 percent of their mass and their legs shortened by 2.4 percent. Their wings, meanwhile, lengthened by 1.3 percent.
    • “In years when temperatures were a bit warmer, the bodies got smaller. In years when temperatures were a bit cooler, we saw an increase in body size, even though the long-term trend was to decline,” Winger said. “So that leads us to believe that temperature is pretty important here.” Smaller animals have larger surface-area-to-volume ratios, and this allows them to lose body heat more quickly. Winger proposes that hotter temperatures could apply pressure on birds to become smaller to stay cooler.
    • Willard, now retired, said he plans to continue measuring birds for as long as he can. On Tuesday, in the museum’s storage, a thousand birds awaited his rulers. “When I’m done talking to you,” he said, “I’m going to do a few more.”
  • Canadians Will Pay More for Food Next Year Thanks to Climate Change: Your restaurant and grocery bills are going to be four percent more expensive, says food expert.
    • The average single person in Canada is forecast to spend $3,692.50 on food in 2020, which is about four percent more than last year. That’s according to a report released Wednesday by the University of Guelph and Dalhousie University.
    • Researcher Simon Somogyi told VICE that climate change is behind higher prices for food we buy that is imported and grown outdoors, including avocados, citrus fruits and bananas. Unexpected snowstorms, droughts, extreme weather events—which are happening more frequently—as well as rising temperatures, impact crops and livestock. Nearly 30 percent of food that Canadians buy is from outside the country and most of it is shipped in from the U.S. and Mexico.
    • “If U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign focuses heavily on Mexico border protection, this may result in even more costly fruit and vegetables for Canadians,” Somogyi said. “We get a large amount of our [produce] from the U.S. and Mexico, and delays at the border crossing can lead to empty grocery store shelves.”
  • Why the US bears the most responsibility for climate change, in one chart: A stunning animation of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions.
    • In 2015, the US emitted 15.53 metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita. China emitted 6.59 metric tons. India emitted just 1.58 metric tons. As these countries get richer, their per capita emissions are poised to rise further. This is why technology transfer from wealthier countries to less developed economies is shaping up to be a critical component of fighting climate change.
      gw_graphic_pie_chart_co2_emissions_by_country_2015.png
  • The simplest of climate models run decades ago accurately projected global warming: Study refutes a common climate-change-denial talking point.
    • A new study effectively snuffs out that argument by looking at how climate models published between 1970 — before such models were the supercomputer-dependent behemoths of physical equations covering glaciers, ocean pH and vegetation, as they are today — and 2007. The study, published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that most of the models examined were uncannily accurate in projecting how much the world would warm in response to increasing amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gases. Such gases, chiefly the main long-lived greenhouse gas pollutant, carbon dioxide, hit record highs this year, according to a new U.N. report out Tuesday.
  • [https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/05/colin-kaepernick-kareem-abdul-jabbar Colin Kaepernick is the black Grinch for those who dream of a white America: The tactics used to discredit the former quarterback are how conservative America has always treated black athletes who speak out (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
    • History has taught us over and over that religious values are quickly abandoned when they conflict with economics or traditional social norms.
    • Efforts to silence the black community and all others who speak out for rights has only gotten worse under the Trump administration. Political and social disagreement and discourse, which are the foundations of our country, have been punished. Aggressive efforts have been made to keep African Americans and college students from voting. Lifelong patriots in our government and military were attacked and belittled during impeachment inquiries. And those who have questioned why so many unarmed black people have been killed by the police have now been told by Attorney General William Barr, “[Americans] have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves,” adding that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” This is the clearest most direct threat yet: “Shut up or die.”
  • Ebola was almost contained in Congo. A wave of violence threatens to bring it roaring back.
    • Their victims were front-line responders to the ongoing Ebola outbreak who had arrived in the remote town of Biakato from across Congo and the world, hoping to cut off the last few chains of the virus’s transmission and end an epidemic that has killed more than 2,200 people over the past 16 months.
  • ‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates
    • “Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones,” Woolf said. Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”
    • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”
    • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.

12/4/2019

  • ‘Hate is infectious’: how the 1989 mass shooting of 14 women echoes today: The massacre at Montreal’s Polytechnique school, fueled by misogyny, is not a horrifying memory confined to a bygone era – rather it seems like a foretelling of things to come
    • Marc Lépine’s page-long suicide note, written in French, made his motivations clear: “Feminists have always enraged me,” he wrote. “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.”
    • ael: so that's what Fish Karma is referring to in his tongue-in-cheek "God Save the NRA"….
  • Decade of 'exceptional' heat likely to be hottest on record, experts say: World Meteorological Organization says 2019 is likely to be second or third warmest year ever
    • The last decade has been one of “exceptional” heat around the world, and was almost certainly the hottest on record, while the oceans have also warmed to record levels and grown markedly more acidic, the World Meteorological Organization has said.
    • Temperatures for the years from 2010 to 2019 were about 1.1C above the average for the pre-industrial period, showing how close the world is coming to the 1.5C of warming that scientists say will cause dramatic impacts, extreme weather and the loss of vital ecosystems.
    • “These impacts are real and happening now and place huge pressures on communities and countries – put simply, these impacts make for a more unstable world, and are already having profound impacts on our ecosystems and biodiversity.”
  • A (Proposed) Pipeline Runs Through It: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline would divide mountains, farmland, and sacred Native American land along its 600-mile route, but it's uniting a diverse community of activists determined to halt its progress.
    • Further, the utility companies seem to be overstating regional demand: In Dominion’s most recent long-term energy plan, most scenarios showed no increase in regional consumption through 2033. Instead, the U.S. is expected to be a leading exporter of natural gas within five years. Some opponents suspect that much of the gas carried by the Atlantic Coast Pipeline would be shipped overseas.
    • Meanwhile, the project’s environmental threats are stacking up. Scientists warned during the project’s environmental impact assessment that the mountainous terrain the pipeline would run through is unstable in spots. Where construction has begun, there have already been problems with erosion and sedimentation. There are also risks of natural gas leaks and explosions that could endanger nearby communities and contaminate drinking water supplies and wildlife habitats. And the concern over emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane from natural gas extraction is only growing as global temperatures rise and countries and states work to address climate change.
  • Scientists just engineered bacteria to eat CO2: Right now, biotech companies feed E. coli sugar as they produce everything from insulin to biofuels. Now, a new strain of the bacteria can suck emissions from the air as their food.
    • Bacteria commonly used in the biotech industry could soon feed on CO2 instead of sugar, turning climate pollution into carbon-neutral biofuels or even food. In a decade-long study, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science engineered for the first time a form of E. coli that can consume carbon dioxide.
    • Several steps are still necessary before it’s clear that the process is feasible. When the current strain of the bacteria feeds on CO2, it grows much more slowly than if it was eating sugar; the researchers think that future versions can be faster. The E. coli will also have to be further modified to produce specific products. And production equipment in biotech factories might also have to change. “There’s still a long way to optimize this process,” says Gleizer.
  • Why Sweden’s Central Bank Divested from Alberta and Reinvested in BC: ‘We chose to exclude those provinces with a high carbon footprint,’ Riksbank tells The Tyee.
    • When Sweden’s central bank announced it would sell off Alberta government bonds because of the province’s high carbon emissions, the reaction from Alberta’s political leaders was swift and defensive. Finance Minister Travis Toews suggested Alberta was victim of an “unfair narrative” about the oil sands. A spokesperson for Premier Jason Kenney said, “If the Swedish central bank is really concerned with making a difference on climate change they need to be investing more in ethical producers such as Alberta, which have shown dramatic gains in reducing emissions.”
  • Moody's downgrades Alberta's credit rating, citing continued dependence on oil: Finance minister says downgrade can be blamed on previous government, lack of pipeline access
    • The Official Opposition fired back, pointing to factors in Moody's rating such as the statement that the province's cut to corporate income tax rates and the elimination of the carbon tax will put pressure on revenues, and that the province's debt burden will be stabilizing at a higher burden than forecasted. "When we were in government, we saw the price of oil go down $80 per barrel. The price of oil has been stable since Jason Kenney's been premier. This downgrade has been entirely self-inflicted," NDP Leader Rachel Notley said Wednesday.
  • Florida Keys Deliver a Hard Message: As Seas Rise, Some Places Can’t Be Saved: KEY WEST, Fla. — Officials in the Florida Keys announced what many coastal governments nationwide have long feared, but few have been willing to admit: As seas rise and flooding gets worse, not everyone can be saved.
    • On Wednesday morning, Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, released the first results of the county’s yearslong effort to calculate how high its 300 miles of roads must be elevated to stay dry, and at what cost. Those costs were far higher than her team expected — and those numbers, she said, show that some places can’t be protected, at least at a price that taxpayers can be expected to pay.
    • The results released Wednesday focus on a single three-mile stretch of road at the southern tip of Sugarloaf Key, a small island 15 miles up Highway 1 from Key West. To keep those three miles of road dry year-round in 2025 would require raising it by 1.3 feet, at a cost of $75 million, or $25 million per mile. Keeping the road dry in 2045 would mean elevating it 2.2 feet, at a cost of $128 million. To protect against expected flooding levels in 2060, the cost would jump to $181 million. And all that to protect about two dozen homes.
  • Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit a Record in 2019, Even as Coal Fades: Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019, researchers said Tuesday, putting countries farther off course from their goal of halting global warming.
    • The new data contained glimmers of good news: Worldwide, industrial emissions are on track to rise 0.6 percent this year, a considerably slower pace than the 1.5 percent increase seen in 2017 and the 2.1 percent rise in 2018. The United States and the European Union both managed to cut their carbon dioxide output this year, while India’s emissions grew far more slowly than expected.
    • Scientists have long warned, however, that it’s not enough for emissions to grow slowly or even just stay flat in the years ahead. In order to avoid many of the most severe consequences of climate change — including deadlier heat waves, fiercer droughts, and food and water shortages — global carbon dioxide emissions would need to steadily decline each year and reach roughly zero well before the end of the century.
  • Planting Native Prairie Could Be a Secret Weapon for Farmers: Iowa, researchers and farmers are discovering that planting strips of native prairie amidst farmland benefits soil, water, biodiversity, and more.
    • When farmer Gary Guthrie describes recent changes to his farm, his eyes light up. After adding native prairie to his central Iowa operation, he remembers hearing the hum of pollinators flocking to the property. “Oh, my goodness, it was stunning, the level of buzzing,” Guthrie said. “That moment was sort of an awakening for me.” The presence of so many bees and other insects was an indicator, to Guthrie, of the health of the land.
    • Guthrie had help from the Iowa State University (ISU) STRIPS (Science-based Trials of Row-crops Integrated with Prairie Strips) program, which was founded in 2003 by scientists hoping study the effects of strategically planted native prairie for soil, water, and biodiversity benefits on farms. After 10 years, the team began to publish a series of papers laying out their results. They found that adding a prairie to a small fraction of a farm yields impressive benefits for water quality and nutrient retention, reducing erosion, providing habitat, and other benefits. In the years since, the ISU team has been working to help more farmers create native prairies.
    • “There’s lack of awareness about the practice… or lack of knowledge relating to why it’s worth implementing,” says Rose. To that end, organizations like PFI and STRIPS have teamed up to arrange field visits and educational opportunities for interested farmers. They’ve joined some 65 farmer-collaborators in Iowa to make prairie a part of their farms. “By connecting farmers (and conservation professionals) at these field days and workshops, we can directly address technical barriers,” says Rose.
    • McDaniel echoed Lee’s sentiment: “You have to understand that farmers are working against very thin margins and with a lot of uncertainty.” At a time when the need for conservation solutions on farms is most pressing, it can also seem most daunting to implement them. Iowa State, for its part, helps to connect farmers with funding that can help offset the costs of prairie strips and other sustainable practices.
    • Most farmers appear to be interested in practices that can help protect the land and the water, too. Biologist Adam Janke put it this way: “the imperative to protect the land is obvious to everyone that relies on it for their livelihood.” Janke says many farmers are aware of the challenges we face because they are seeing them in real-time. Broader change will come, he adds, when “more early adopters and local champions share their experience [with] why it works for them and their farm.”
  • Coal Knew, Too: A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change.
    • Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization. “There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.” “Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
    • In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”
    • While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.
    • Evidence of what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change and when is critical to the legal strategy of those seeking damages for carbon dioxide emissions. If fossil fuel companies were aware of their products’ harmful effects on the planet, they could be held liable for damages.
    • “The coal mining industry — the utilities that were burning it for electricity, along with the railroads who were hauling it — and manufacturing industries like steel were the first corporate forces to become climate deniers and try to block action on climate policy,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. “They fought the hardest because they had the biggest existential threat.”
  • Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change: But it might fill in a few key pieces of the clean energy puzzle.
    • The headline news from the paper is that the cost of capturing a ton of CO2 — estimated at around $600 in 2011 — has fallen to between $94 and $232. Almost any source of renewable energy can prevent a ton of carbon for cheaper than that, but still, down at the lower end, beneath $100, DAC starts to look viable in a low-carbon world.
    • First, it’s like lighting money on fire. CO2 used for greenhouses has economic co-benefits (i.e., it’s worth money). Same with CO2 used to make fuels, or for enhanced oil recovery, or as an industrial feedstock. In contrast, burying CO2 has no economic co-benefits whatsoever. It’s not worth anything to anyone (except, y’know, humanity as a whole, over the long term).
  • Billionaires back Canadian company to build first ‘negative emissions’ plant: Silicon Valley invests in technology that can scrub a megaton of C02 from the atmosphere yearly, the equivalent of planting 40 million trees
    • The Squamish, B.C.-based company announced Thursday it had closed another equity financing round and raised US$68 million, which it describes as the largest private investment to date in technology that captures carbon directly from the air.
    • Carbon Engineering has also developed another process it calls “air to fuels” which uses the carbon it captures and turns it into fuels that can power existing cars and trucks.
    • He also announced his involvement in a group called Breakthrough Energy Ventures to fund companies and technologies that would reduce carbon in each of those five industries, alongside billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal.
  • See How the World’s Most Polluted: We visualized the damaging, tiny particles that wreak havoc on human health. From the Bay Area to New Delhi, see how the world’s worst pollution compares with your local air.

12/3/2019

  • Climate change driving entire planet to dangerous 'tipping point‘: Scientists "don’t think people realize how little time we have left,” to stop irreversible and disastrous changes to Earth’s climate systems. But there is hope.
    • Evidence that irreversible changes in Earth’s climate systems are underway means we are in a state of planetary emergency, leading climate scientists warn. A cascade of tipping points could amount to a global tipping point, where multiple earth systems march past the point of no return, they say. That possibility is “an existential threat to civilization,” write Tim Lenton and colleagues in this week’s Nature.
    • For example, the slow collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet appears to be in progress. The latest data show that the same thing might be happening to part of the East Antarctic ice sheet, says Lenton, a climate scientist at University of Exeter in Southwest England. If those both melted, they could raise sea levels 21 feet (7 meters) over the next few hundred years. “Exeter, where I am, was founded by the Romans 1,900 years ago. It will probably be under water 1,500 years from now,” he says. “We shouldn’t be discounting the legacy we’re leaving to future generations, no matter how far they are in the future.”
    • Tipping points were once thought to be triggered only when global warming was above 9 degrees F (5 degrees C). But IPCC reports in the past year warn that they can happen between 1.8 degree F (1 degree C) and 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C). Every fractional rise in temperature increases the risk of triggering one of 30 major tipping points. With just 1 degree C of current warming, nine of these are now thought to be beginning to tip. Just as with that metaphorical 200-year-old tree, no one knows if the next axe strike—or degree—will topple it.
    • It’s already too late to prevent some tipping points from happening, since there is evidence that at least nine have already been breached, she said. The risk of those cascading into an irreversible global tipping point with tremendous impacts on human civilization warrants a declaration of a planetary climate emergency.
    • Meanwhile, a recent UN report revealed that the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada, Australia and other countries plan to produce 120 percent more fossil fuels by 2030. Those same governments agreed to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees C under the Paris climate agreement, but appear to be more worried about their economic growth.
    • The risks posed by climate tipping points are not part of any economic analysis of climate policies, acknowledges Geoffrey Heal, an economist at the Columbia Business School in New York City. “If they were included it would make a huge difference… suggest[ing] that we strengthen our climate policies massively,” Heal said in an email.
    • Over the last 12 months a broad societal awareness tipping point appears to have been reached—the Greta Thunberg effect—with millions of young student strikers and many others demanding urgent climate action, he says. At the same time, more and more finance companies, businesses, and cities are adopting tough climate targets.
  • Republicans Have a Climate Change Problem: Well, we all do.
    • The literal end of the world as we know it is going to affect each and every one of us whether we believe it is happening or not. This is a fact that transcends political partisanship amongst the generations who must live with the immense failure of our parents and grandparents. Older Republicans essentially adopt the position that climate change does not exist and it is not something to be concerned about, while younger Republicans are more likely to side with the aggressive vision of Bernie Sanders than the know-nothing denialist vision of their elders.
  • New Documents Reveal Exxon-owned Canadian Oil Giant's Shifting Climate Change PR: “Major contributors to atmospheric pollution are the automotive engine and industrial fossil fuel consumers,” Imperial’s 1971 document reports.
    • New Canadian archival documents obtained by DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center add to our understanding of how Imperial's scientific planning documents and other records initially approached climate change as one of many PR issues — to be addressed mainly with talking points and messaging about the small steps industry was taking to address pollution — but by the end of the 1990s, Imperial had joined the rest of the oil and gas industry in vocally questioning climate science, even as that science became increasingly well established.
    • In the early 1990s, Imperial left a paper trail showing that the company acknowledged much of the science surrounding climate change, though the company’s records from the time also described areas where uncertainty remained. By the end of that decade, the science on climate change (much of it borne out in th current century’s first two decades) had grown more certain — but so too had Imperial’s emphasis on uncertainty.
  • Coal power becoming 'uninsurable' as firms refuse cover: US insurers join retreat from European insurers meaning coal projects cannot be built or operated
    • The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report. The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.
  • Want to fight climate change effectively? Here’s where to donate your money.: These are six of the most high-impact, cost-effective, evidence-based organizations. You may not have heard of them.

12/2/2019

  • One of the most overlooked consequences of climate change? Our mental health: Ecoanxiety. Ecoparalysis. Solastalgia. Call it what you want— when it comes to climate change and mental health, the future is now.
    • Many of the migrants fleeing to Europe for the past seven years came from the Sahel region of Africa that has experienced drought for a decade or more. Many of those migrants arriving at the southern border of the United States during the past two years have come from the "dry corridor" of Central America, which has also experienced periods of drought alternating with periods of extreme flooding.
    • These problems have been given specific names like 'ecoanxiety', 'ecoparalysis', and 'solastalgia', the latter referring to the distress and isolation caused by the gradual removal of solace from the present state of one's home environment. Young people are especially vulnerable to these syndromes. A recent survey of youth living in the United States commissioned by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than 70 percent believe climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation. About 57 percent of those interviewed reported that climate change makes them feel afraid.
  • Climate change is the biggest threat to Trudeau’s minority government
  • Scientist's theory of climate's Titanic moment the 'tip of a mathematical iceberg': Formula for climate emergency shows if ‘reaction time is longer than intervention time left’ then ‘we have lost control’
    • Rather than being something abstract and open to interpretation, Schellnhuber says the climate emergency is something with clear and calculable risks that you could put into a formula. And so he wrote one. Emergency = R × U = p × D × τ / T
  • Flight shaming, offsets and electric planes: How aviation is tackling climate change: Air industry knows it has a carbon footprint problem - so what is it doing about it?
    • But air travel is only growing. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts 7.8 billion passengers will be flying by 2036, a near doubling of the four billion who flew in 2017.
    • In 2016, ICAO airlines (about 290 worldwide) also agreed to the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). CORSIA aims to offset 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2035, by providing more than $50 billion Cdn for climate projects. All participating countries will be required to begin offsetting any emission growth from 2019-20 levels starting in 2021. (As a signatory of CORSIA, Canada began monitoring and verifying emissions from international flights on Jan. 1, 2019.)
    • As CBC News reported earlier this year, the general consensus is that carbon offset programs have improved. But there is still debate about whether they actually work. The anti argument says they do nothing to actually reduce carbon emissions. The pro argument says if they weren't tied to carbon offset projects, climate-friendly initiatives such as tree planting or wind and solar energy development would never happen.
    • Kathryn Ervine, an associate professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax who has researched carbon offsets, said they are simply a way for airlines and individual travellers to try to appease their guilt, and aren't beneficial.Her suggestion? "Go and find a worthwhile green initiative that you know is making an impact and make a financial contribution to it."

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