A DDD Editorial
The media woefully underreports anything to do with climate change, and I was listening to Media Matters on the radio last week and they confirmed it with data. Apparently there were fewer stories, TV and print, about climate change in 2013 than there were in 2009 even with many more extreme weather events.
Even the excellent NYT stories about the drought in the Western US don't mention climate change at all, and one major news channel [Fox] denies and mocks climate change constantly.
But as the President said in the SOTU speech it's real, and it's true......we are heading for major weather issues but the problem is humans can't deal with this thought, and don't really want to hear about it....hence the media nonstories.
All we can do here at DDD is collect the best information we can, and send it out to you. The good news is the really destabilizing events that will disrupt society are a decade or so away, but the bad news is the extreme weather and it's effects, and billions in costs, are going to get steadily worse. Don't forget the changes we are experiencing last and this year are the result of a 1C change in temperature, and even if we implement everything to cut CO2 we are guaranteed to go up to 2C over the next decades......and as the stories below show the likelihood of a global response or even a US initiative to seriously cut emissions is close to zero for many years.
So think long term, the next decade and beyond - are you living in the right place [and if you find the right place let me know]? Is your house floodproof? Windproof? etc.....knowledge is power, and even if we as individuals can't do anything about climate change at least you won't be surprised.
And if you have a chance watch the full interview with Bill McKibben......
Note - sorry, no videos or jokes today.......next week!
1/ We had some encouraging words about action on climate change from the President in the SOTU speech, and we will find out if he means it when the decision on the Keystone pipeline is announced.
But even if he says no to Keystone, there are worrying trends around the world on the fight to cut CO2 emissions. Oil is getting cheaper and in the short term, more plentiful, which means there are minimal incentives to change to renewable energy sources. Europe is retreating on emissions, and Canada has done an end run on the tar sands oil even if the pipeline is denied......
A thoughtful, reasoned article from The Nation.......
Three Signs of Retreat in the Global War on Climate Change
In the carbon wars, big oil is winning.
February 13, 2014
(AP Photo/John Giles)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address, it would have been easy to conclude that we were slowly but surely gaining in the war on climate change. “Our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet,” the president said. “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth.” Indeed, it’s true that in recent years, largely thanks to the dampening effects of the Great Recession, US carbon emissions were in decline (though they grew by 2 percent in 2013). Still, whatever the president may claim, we’re not heading toward a “cleaner, safer planet.” If anything, we’re heading toward a dirtier, more dangerous world.
A series of recent developments highlight the way we are losing ground in the epic struggle to slow global warming. This has not been for lack of effort. Around the world, dedicated organizations, communities and citizens have been working day by day to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote the use of renewable sources of energy. The struggle to prevent construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a case in point. Asnoted in a recent New York Times article, the campaign against that pipeline has galvanized the environmental movement around the country and attracted thousands of activists to Washington, DC, for protests and civil disobedience at the White House. But efforts like these, heroic as they may be, are being overtaken by a more powerful force: the gravitational pull of cheap, accessible carbon-based fuels, notably oil, coal and natural gas.
2/ Bill Moyers has some of the best in depth reporting on the air, and here he sits with Bill McKibben for 26 minutes on climate change. I found this interview riveting, as McKibben is not some wild eyed fanatic environmentalist. He is a logical, rational man with no illusions about the power of the forces driving the continued degradation of our planet. I also found very relevant what he says at the 11 minute mark about how long we have if we carry on as we are now, consuming more and more fossil fuel worldwide, before the process is irreversible.....
This should be required viewing for our elites.....but of course it won't be......
Bill McKibben to Obama: Say No to Big Oil
February 7, 2014
After the State Department issued a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, environmentalists and those opposed to the 1,179-mile pipeline have intensified their push for the Obama administration to reject the project.
This week, Bill Moyers talks with Bill McKibben, an activist who has dedicated his life to saving the planet from environmental collapse, about his hopes that Americans will collectively pressure Obama to stand up to big oil.
“Most people understand that we’re in a serious fix,” McKibben tells Moyers, “There’s nothing you can do as individuals that will really slow down this juggernaut … You can say the same thing about the challenges faced by people in the civil rights or the abolition movement, or the gay rights movement or the women’s movement. In each case, a movement arose; if we can build a movement, then we have a chance.”
This is a two minute segment to give you a taste, an appetizer before the three course meal above.
In this clip, Bill Moyers asks environmental activist Bill McKibben why the State Department concluded in a long-anticipated report delivered last week that the proposed 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline would basically have no impact on climate change. Like so many issues in politics today, McKibben says the answer basically comes down to money and power. “The American Petroleum Institute told the president two years ago, ‘you do what we say on Keystone or there’ll be political trouble,’” McKibben tells Moyers. “We’ll find out how scared he was.”
3/ This Rolling Stone story is mentioned by McKibben, and it's how we need to ignore the congratulations about how we have cut our coal emissions.....all we are doing is exporting the problem to China and India......and the atmosphere doesn't care where the CO2 comes from, this is a global problem.
This excellent story from Tim Dickinson goes deeper, into the real reason the Keystone pipeline is needed by the oil and coal industry and who is behind the push - surprise, his name is Koch, the third brother Bill. The pipeline is needed to export the dirtiest coal in existence, a byproduct of the tar sands oil.
It also shows the absolute corruption of the political process by the most powerful corporations on the planet, including [unfortunately] the Clintons who wholeheartedly support the oil industry......
How the U.S. Exports Global Warming
While Obama talks of putting America on the path to a clean, green future,
we're flooding world markets with cheap, high carbon fuels
The greening of American energy is both real and profound. Since President Obama took office, the nation's solar capacity has increased more than tenfold. Wind power has more than doubled, to 60,000 megawatts – enough to power nearly 20 million homes. Thanks to aggressive new fuel-efficiency standards, the nation's drivers are burning nearly 5 billion fewer gallons of gasoline a year than in 2008. The boom in cheap natural gas, meanwhile, has disrupted the coal industry. Coal-power generation, though still the nation's top source of electricity, is off nearly 20 percent since 2008. More than 150 coal plants have already been shuttered, and the EPA is expected to issue regulations in June that will limit emissions from existing coal facilities. These rules should accelerate the shift to natural gas, which – fracking's risks to groundwater aside – generates half the greenhouse pollution of coal.
But there's a flip side to this American success story. Even as our nation is pivoting toward a more sustainable energy future, America's oil and coal corporations are racing to position the country as the planet's dirty-energy dealer – supplying the developing world with cut-rate, high-polluting, climate-damaging fuels. Much like tobacco companies did in the 1990s – when new taxes, regulations and rising consumer awareness undercut domestic demand – Big Carbon is turning to lucrative new markets in booming Asian economies where regulations are looser. Worse, the White House has quietly championed this dirty-energy trade.
"The Obama administration wants to be seen as a climate leader, but there is no source of fossil fuel that it is prepared to leave in the ground," says Lorne Stockman, research director for Oil Change International. "Coal, gas, refinery products – crude oil is the last frontier on this. You want it? We're going to export it.
4/ The whole of the East coast has had cold and snow for the last month, but did you know Alaska, the Arctic and Greenland have had record high temperatures? We're cold here, but it's balanced by other areas being hotter......
It’s easy to forget about other places in the world, or even in your own country, when you’re out shoveling snow, or people who are homeless suffer the worst of urban cold snaps, or harbor seals on the Hudson River ride ice floes, or your city shuts down due to a mismanaged winter storm.
The polar vortex, normally tucked away much closer to the Arctic, has swept down several times this winter, bringing cold temperatures and snow to large segments of the U.S. east of the Rockies. Many experience this and either forget or doubt what the data show: that 2013 was the fourth-hottest year on record (or second-hottest
But not only is this cold not unprecedented — it’s not even happening most places.
Courtesy of Climate Central, a look at historical frigid cold periods in some of the U.S. cities that are in a deep freeze this winter shows that the number of frigid nights have seen a steady decline over the last few decades. The polar vortex pulled thermometers below zero and prompted fears that the Super Bowl would be paralyzed by snow and frigid temperatures. In the end, the game was 49 degrees at kickoff, making it only the third-coldest Super Bowl ever — Seattle and Denver were actually colder than it was in the Meadowlands. The University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer shows how this cold has moved south, leaving the Arctic much warmer than normal, and parts of North America colder than normal as of Saturday.
5/ This article from the Times was written by scientists, so many of you [me included] won't completely understand it, but the gist of the story is that the Polar Vortex weather we have been experiencing may reoccur, or it may not.....the point being extreme cold is not the new normal, but it may be......
Just an aside - Jon Stewart had a good joke, with his commentary "it's colder in Florida than it is at the Sochi Winter Olympics"....
This article is a good illustration what drives people crazy about scientists, and specifically climate boffins - the lack of clarity and/or firm opinions.......
Updated below, 12:12 p.m. | There’s a noteworthy letter in today’s edition of the journal Science, titled “Global Warming and This Winter’s Cold Weather,” that aims to cut through the flood of overwrought assertions about recent Northern Hemisphere winter weather in the context of global warming.
It’s written by five leading climate scientists, all of whom have long been reliable guides to a complicated and consequential body of science — John M. Wallace at the University of Washington, Isaac M. Held at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, David W. J. Thompson at Colorado State University, Kevin E. Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and John E. Walsh at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
The letter is behind the journal’s subscription wall, so I’m providing excerpts here:
In mid-January, a lobe of the polar vortex sagged southward over the central and eastern United States. All-time low temperature records for the calendar date were set at O’Hare Airport in Chicago [–16°F (–27°C), 6 January], at Central Park in New York (4°F (–15.6°C), 7 January], and at many other stations. Since that event, several substantial snow storms have blanketed the East Coast. Some have been touting such stretches of extreme cold as evidence that global warming is a hoax, while others have been citing them as evidence that global warming is causing a “global weirding” of the weather. In our view it is neither.
As climate scientists, we share the prevailing view in our community that human-induced global warming is happening and that, without mitigating measures, the Earth will continue to warm over the next century with serious consequences.
............................................................ .................... Even in a warming climate, we could experience an extraordinary run of cold winters, but harsher winters in future decades are not among the most likely nor the most serious consequences of global warming.
I asked the authors if they had similar concerns about a recent burst of assertions related to threats from global warming to the future of the Winter Olympics. Here’s my query (I’ve cleaned up email shorthand here and in the replies).
6/ The UK has had the weirdest weather ever, and the worst flooding for 500 years........for the last 6 weeks there have been record rain events, widespread flooding, hurricane force winds, snow and major damage along the coastline......and there is more coming this weekend....
From the Independent, and they have a photo slide show of the storms and their effects....
UK weather gets even freakier: After storms, floods and gales - a bog fire raged
And more freak weather is about to lash the country - more gales and downpours into Saturday
7/ Water is the next huge issue with the climates changing, and if you look at some of the countries affected there may be some military issues here.....
Desperate countries do desperate things......and one of the countries is Iran.......
Forget plastic bottles of mineral water, rivers for swimming or water for bathing — many countries are facing water shortages so severe, millions are without running faucets.
From California to China, government leaders are declaring water insecurity a security issue. Conflict has already broken out in several countries and the potential for more violence has reached a boiling point. As people worry when they will next drink, water-dependent power grids are starting to flicker, forest fires are sparking and businesses are closing their operations. Once seen as just an environmental issue, the world's water crisis is a security threat.
Here are 9 countries facing imminent water shortages.
8/ Rightly or wrongly the rest of the world looks to the US for guidance, and what we do matters. If we want China and India to reign in their inefficient coal burning power plants, we have to pressure them from the moral high ground. If the President approves the Keystone pipeline, this sends a message to the rest of the world, and makes slowing the CO2 emissions to a less than catastrophic level less likely......
A very good story from Al Jazeera......
Keystone approval would set terrible example
The president must lead now on climate change, for the sake of the planet’s future
- Topics:
- Environment
- Keystone Pipeline
- Barack Obama
Weld shacks sit over pipe joints during construction of the Gulf Coast Project pipeline in Atoka, Okla., in March 2013.Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Barack Obama will soon have to decide whether to approve the enormous northern portion of the Keystone XL project, which would create a pipeline from oil production in the Alberta tar sands to Steele City, Neb. The southern portion of Keystone, already built, takes oil from there to ports in the Gulf of Mexico.
The president should reject the plan. Approval of Keystone XL would have a grim impact on humanity’s chances of mitigating climate catastrophe. The long-term negative effects would go far beyond the carbon pollution from the transported tar-sands oil.
9/ Unlike the rest of Floriduh, which is officially in denial about climate change thanks to Rick Scott, the South is becoming aware of what's coming with the change in sea levels and routine flooding of some cities....this is a three minute segment from the ABC affiliate in Miami on what the local gumments are doing about the effects of salt water intrusion.....
FROM SALT WATER INTRUSION INTO OUR DRINKING SUPPLY, TO THE SEASONAL TIDE FLOODING ON MIAMI BEACH. WE ARE ALREADY LIVING WITH THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE. THE CHALLENGES OF SEA LEVEL RISING WILL CONTINUE IN THE DECADES TO COME. LOCAL "10 NEWS"REPORTER CHRISTINA EXPLORES WHAT OUR COMMUNITY IS NOW DOING TO PREPARE. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HERE. THREAT TO THE VERY EXIS THREAT TO THE VERY EXISTENCE.
My opinion - South Florida is living in a dreamworld, as there hasn't been a hurricane anywhere close to Miami/Ft. Lauderdale since 2005 and when it comes, there will be widespread flooding like they have never seen before. We were living on a [very nice] drainage canal in Dade County in 2005, and the wind from Hurricane Wilma drove the sea landwards and a storm surge came up the Intercoastal, went over the saltwater intrusion dam and up our fresh water canal. The water took days to drain because there were huge rains as well flowing towards the Intercoastal, but meeting the seawater driven in by the wind.....
When it happens, and it's not "if" but when, you will see a bigtime collapse of real estate prices as people look to bale out of SFla......
10/ I just bought this book.....and yes this review is written by Al Gore, who has become a joke on Fox News but who is a thoughtful, articulate [if a little stiff] speaker and writer......
In some alternate universe the real President was elected, and we would have had eight years of President Gore instead of the idiot, and wouldn't life be different......
Without a Trace
‘The Sixth Extinction,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert
By AL GOREFEB. 10, 2014
Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.
In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
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