My now-annual forays to the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting are always like a week-long blast of pure oxygen. The only trouble with interviewing world’d leading scientists all week, is that I miss the incredible presentations, and occasional fireworks, that go on in Moscone Center.
One that got a lot of play this week was Governor Jerry Brown’s speech to assembled scientists, in which he sounded a defiant clarion call against the incoming Trump/Putin administration’s anti-science ignorance, hatred, bigotry, and fascism.
Governor Brown shows an example of my watchwords for the coming years. Local, Vocal, and DON’T BACK DOWN.
Brown is speaking to the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in San Francisco two days ago. As reader CS says, this is “probably the largest single yearly gathering of geophysics related scientists in the world; close to 25,000 people attended it this year.” Brown’s remarks begin at around time 2:00, and you’ll see that he swings right from the introductory applause into a call for renewed energy on behalf of fact-based policies, science, truth.
From about time 3:30 to 3:50, the sound on the video fades away. Just wait it out.
From 4:30 to 5:15, Brown begins one of his “we’re ready to fight” riffs. The speech as a whole is unpolished, but among its charms is Brown’s ability to seem self-aware and even self-mocking. An example is in this passage: First he says that Big Tobacco was brought down by a combination of scientists and lawyers. Then, “And in California, we’ve got plenty of lawyers! … We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight!”
At 5:30, he introduces the “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Brown? You’re not a country” argument, about the way California has used its technical advances and sheer scale to set national and even international environmental standards. “We have a lot of firepower! We’ve got the scientists. We’ve got the universities. We have the national labs. We have a lot of political clout and sophistication for the battle. And we will persevere!” Continue reading “California Governor Brown Sounds Clarion Call to #RESIST”
"If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite," says Brown to #AGU16 conference and applause. pic.twitter.com/1oHssoQ4vo
The year showed “a stronger, more pronounced signal of persistent warming than any other year in our observation record,” he said.
These changes have had considerable impacts on Arctic ecosystems and native communities, as well as opening up the fragile region to more commercial activity. But they also have impacts outside the region, including potentially influencing weather conditions over North America, Europe and Asia. Continue reading “Sleeping Giant Awakening”
Here at the world’s largest scientific meeting, the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, the mood is tinged with a steely resolve.
Have been interviewing scientists and will continue through the week.
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.
“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
“Do you now, or have you ever, given a damn about your children’s future?”
I’m at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, where the atmosphere is tense.
At the onset of perhaps the most regressive, anti-science administration in history, an administration that may itself be acting at the behest of a hostile foreign power – scientists are somber – but quietly resolved.
Donald Trump’s transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking agency officials to identify which employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output.
The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years and “which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.”
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While there have been many instances of political appointees and career scientists clashing in various administrations, what is novel is the request for the names of so many individual scientists, and the fact that it comes during the transition period, before the Trump administration has even taken power. This may be a signal of even more intense politicization after the inauguration.
Yale University environmental historian Paul Sabin said in an interview that previous administrations have worked to install like-minded energy and environmental experts in key agencies, often at the expense of employees from previous administrations.
“But what seems unusual is singling people out for a very specific substantive issue, and treating their work on that substantive issue as, by default, contaminating or disqualifying,” Sabin said, adding that officials can now track a civil servant’s past activities “in such a systematic way.”
During Ronald Reagan’s time, when his political appointees sparred with officials at the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, Sabin noted, “it would have been so much harder to collect it on paper and track it down.”
A punishing blast of Arctic air will plunge into the northern half of the Lower 48 in five to seven days, dispensing some of the most frigid air since 2014 or 2015 in some areas.
Computer models are unanimous in predicting that such a cold wave will occur, although they differ some on exactly how cold and how far south and east the Arctic air will penetrate. It is unlikely that this cold wave will be as intense as the January 2014 event because it is happening earlier in the winter and less snow is on the ground in North America (snow cover acts like a freezer and helps cold air masses stay cold when they exit the Arctic).
The bitter cold air is expected to first arrive in the northern Rockies and northern Plains on Sunday. It should reach Chicago on Tuesday and the northeast United States by Wednesday or Thursday.
While subject to change, the GFS model predicts temperatures from Chicago to western Montana to be 30 to 50 degrees colder than normal next Wednesday morning.
As my new video on Florida Sea Level rise (see below) shows, this is happening.
I hate to say it, but clearly at this point, the only thing that will get the attention of the climate denial crowd will be a disastrous crash in the coastal housing bubble, which may already be underway. My visit in Miami showed me clearly the degree to which South Florida, and many, many, Americans, are deeply in denial about what is happening right in their front yards. I’m sorry that so many are going to suffer, but wake-up calls are often painful.
Once again, this raises a key question for all Americans: What year will coastal property values crash?
I first posed the question in 2009, pointing out that coastal property values will crash long before sea levels have actually risen a few feet. Instead, coastal property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community, mortgage bankers and opinion-makers — along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public — realize that it is too late for us to stop catastrophic sea level rise.
When sellers outnumber buyers, and banks become reluctant to write 30-year mortgages for doomed property and insurance rates soar, then the coastal property bubble will slow, peak, and crash.
This appears to be underway. As the Times reports, “Nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period, according to the housing data.” Since 2001, “home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood.”
South Miami mayor Philip Stoddard warns that “coastal mortgages are growing into as big a bubble as the housing market of 2007.” But, he notes, when this bubble crashes it will never recover. Indeed, property values will keep declining since the waters will keep rising and the storm surges will only get worse.
