Month: June 2015

Watching medical dramas on TV, one would assume that the great advances in medicine of the last century or so are mostly the result of heroic, intrepid Doctors and Health professionals, saving lives and stamping out disease.  One would be wrong.

The biggest advances in human well being have come from simple public health measures, including modern water and food systems, better education, and vaccines.  Much of this critical public health infrastructure is under threat from fossil fuel burning and climate change.
The Lancet, a leading UK medical journal, has the study.

ABC (Australia):

Climate change poses such a threat to public health it risks undoing the gains of the last 50 years, a major study has found.

The Lancet Commission on climate change and health has found the threat continues to be underestimated, but that tackling it could be a huge opportunity to improve global health.

“The effects of climate change are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health,” said the report published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

“The direct effects of climate change include increased heat stress, floods, drought, and increased frequency of intense storms, with the indirect threatening population health through adverse changes in air pollution, the spread of disease, food insecurity and under-nutrition, displacement, and mental ill health.”

Last year, the World Health Organisation predicted that between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.

CNN gets reaction to the Papal encyclical from Scientist and Evangelical Katharine Hayhoe.

Below, Hayhoe’s own 90 second “Elevator Pitch” for climate science includes an appeal for an ethical argument.

Continue reading “Katharine Hayhoe: Responding to the Pope”

Salon:

Any associations you might have with Alaska being a generally chilly place, actually, were belied by last month’s heat wave: with average temperatures 7.1 degrees above normal, the state had its hottest May in 91 years of record-keeping. Here, via NASA’s Earth Observatory, is what that deviation looked like:

Meteorologists attributed the unusual heat to a “kinked jet stream that is sending air masses in a more north-south flow than the more typical east-west direction” — a pattern that may be connected to two typhoons in the Pacific.

In the long-term, the problem gets much scarier. Thanks to climate change, the state, with the rest of the Arctic, is currently heating up at twice the rate of lower latitudes, and its weather, as one state meteorologist, who was only sort of joking, put it, is “broken.” Earlier this year, Slate’s Eric Holthaus did a deep-dive on why that’s happening:

Alaska’s recent surge of back-to-back warm winters comes after a record-snowy 2012, in which the National Guard was employed to help dig out buried towns. Then, about two years ago, something in the climate system switched. The state’s recent brush with extreme weather is more than just year-to-year weather variability. Alaska is at the point where the long-term trend of warming has begun to trump seasonal weather fluctuations. A recent shift toward warmer offshore ocean temperatures is essentially adding more fuel to the fire, moving the state toward more profound tipping points like the irreversible loss of permafrost and increasingly violent weather. If the current warm ocean phase (which began in 2014) holds for a decade or so, as is typical, Alaska will quickly become a different place.

Readers also may remember the early arrival of wild fires in Siberia this past spring – creating surreal video images like this one:

For the last few months, maybe the only place in the arctic where temperatures were below normal, was Greenland. I can attest to how cold the last few weeks were there.

But now, Greenland is catching up…

Stay tuned, have some pretty good stills and video from the Dark Snow Camp.

New paper by Kevin Trenberth and others reaffirms the relationship between climate change and more extreme weather events.

Above, Trenberth and others map out why in recent interviews. Below, synopsis of the new paper.

USAToday:

“We have a new normal,” said lead author Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and two fellow scientists. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what is used to be: all storms, without exception, are different.”

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. This extra CO2 has caused temperatures of the atmosphere and oceans to rise, allowed the atmosphere to hold more water vapor (which can add extra fuel to storms), and caused global sea levels to rise.

Trenberth’s study was published as a “Perspectives” piece in Nature Climate Change, a peer-reviewed U.K. journal. It said that human influence on weather events such as Superstorm Sandy, Super Typhoon Haiyan, or the 2013 floods in Colorado tends to be “underestimated.”

He said that Sandy’s and Haiyan’s strength were both intensified due to warm ocean water, and that the primary cause of the Colorado floods “probably would not have occurred without human-caused warming,” Trenberth said.

Guardian:

Lead author Kevin Trenberth and his team recognized that there are two potential ways a warming climate may lead to weather changes. The first way is through something called thermodynamics. We experience thermodynamics in our own lives. Warm air can be more humid than cold air; we feel that difference throughout the year. Also, warm air evaporates water more quickly. That’s why hair blow dryers and restroom hand dryers usually use heated air. It’s why puddles evaporate more quickly on hot days.

In short, the atmosphere can become either warmer and wetter or warmer and dryer, depending on where you are. The general rule of thumb is that areas which are currently dry will become drier; areas that are currently wet will become wetter; and rains will occur in heavier downbursts.

The scientists list the following questions as a guide to their study.

1. Given a particular weather pattern, how were the temperatures, precipitation, and associated impacts influenced by climate change?

Continue reading “Extreme Weather: The Connection to Climate Affirmed, Again”

In a social media universe, one needs to look at not only the formal news coverage, but also the number of efforts like the above, inspired by something like the Pope’s encyclical.
The number of parodies and youtubes pro and con suggest that the the Climate letter has had the desired effect sparking discussion, including unhinged right wing outrage.

Below, a rant from a far-right conservative Catholic science denier, decrying “Antipope Francis'” acceptance of evolution, among other things.

Continue reading “Pope’s Mic-Drop Moment in Climate Rap”

Citizen’s Climate Lobby is the most effective voice for a broad based carbon tax and dividend system, designed to turn the country away from fossil fuels, and towards a non-carbon economy.

Monday, June 22, is their lobby day on Capitol Hill, so might be a good day to add your voice to theirs.

Citizens Climate Lobby:

On Monday, June 22, the day before CCL lobbies on the Hill, we will participate in Congressional Climate Message Day (CCMD), communicating by phone and social media with our members of Congress to register our support for legislation to price carbon.
Nine hundred Citizens’ Climate Lobby volunteers will be meeting with elected officials on Capitol Hill on June 23, lobbying for carbon fee and dividend legislation to address climate change. Our meetings can be even more successful if you contact your one representative and two senators and declare your support for congressional action on climate change. You can contact your members of Congress by calling or Tweeting them.

Please mark your calendars for June 22 to take this action. It will only take a few minutes, but it will have a huge impact in our efforts to fight climate change.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl came on Fox News Sunday show, yesterday, and showed how its done.

At 4:10, deftly and with a kindly clerical smile, he bodyslams Rush Limbaugh.
During the rest of the interview he handles Chris Wallace’s predictable talking points as smoothly as a ninja sushi chef.

More Please.

UPDATE:

NYTimes:

On the first Sunday after Pope Francis issued a landmark document on the environment, Roman Catholics attending Mass in Kenya, France, Mexico, Peru and the United States said they were thankful that he was using his pulpit to address climate change, pollution and global inequality.

But few priests or bishops — other than in parts of Latin America — used their own pulpits on Sunday to pass on the pope’s message, according to parish visits, interviews with Catholic leaders and reports from Catholics after Mass. Despite the urgent call to action in Francis’ document and the international attention it received, it will take some time to know whether Catholic clergy are familiar or comfortable enough with its themes to preach them to the faithful.

It traditionally takes months for papal teaching documents, known as encyclicals, to be read, understood and disseminated. And this one, “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You: On Care for Our Common Home,” is long, nearly 200 pages, and intricately weaves spiritual and moral teachings with economic, scientific and political analysis. It includes a forceful denunciation of a global economic system that the pope says plunders the resources of the poor for the benefit of the rich, leaving the poor to disproportionately suffer the consequences, including the effects of climate change.

UPDATE: in doing some further research for this piece, I discovered a guy I never heard of before, Aussie Jim Jeffries, who is, warning, pretty uncompromising in his take on religion – and funny as hell.
——

I know this must have been a tough week for many readers, with such relentless media attention on the Pope, and whether or not climate is a spiritual, moral, and ethical issue.  While, like Groucho,  I’m not a member of any club, I know there are some large groups out there that are pretty important to reach, and who demonstrably do not respond  solely to the the message of science – so I think what happened this week is critical, and we’ll take it.

So, for the many readers who are blessedly unchurched, I offer this post – to cleanse the palate, as it were, after a week of relentless focus on the Pope and his climate message, how bout some George Carlin, Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, Eddy Izzard and John Fugelsang?

Happy Solstice.

Reminder: It’s not just for Catholics.