Month: May 2017

Joe Romm in ClimateProgress:

Will President Donald Trump’s surprise move to fire FBI director James Comey this week change the dynamics that had appeared to be leading toward a decision by the Trump administration to exit the landmark Paris climate accord?

Some say yes. “Every president in the modern era who gets into trouble at home, looks to opportunities to engage other leaders on the world stage publicly and cooperatively to demonstrate their legitimacy,” Andrew Light, senior fellow at World Resources Institute and former U.S. State Department climate official, told me.

Exiting the Paris agreement would make it all but impossible for Trump to work with other world leaders on a global stage.

Backing up a couple of weeks, before the stunning Comey decision and constantly-shifting rationale behind it, things were looking very bad for global climate action.

“Momentum has turned against the Paris climate agreement” in the White House, the Washington Post reported on May 3. Trump himself slammed Paris in an April 29 speech to supporters, promising he would end “a broken system of global plunder at American expense.” The President said he would make a “big decision” on Paris within two weeks (that is, by May 12).

We were told the decision would come after a final meeting of advisers this Tuesday. But that meeting was scrapped at the last minute, reportedlybecause Secretary of State Rex Tillerson couldn’t attend. The same day, the White House announced that no decision on Paris would be made until June, after the G7 meeting with other world leaders.

Meanwhile..

Los Angeles Times:

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed his name Thursday to a document that affirms the need for international action against climate change, adding further uncertainty to the direction of climate policy under the Trump administration.

The document, signed by Tillerson and seven foreign ministers from Arctic nations meeting this week in Fairbanks, Alaska, says the participants concluded their meeting “noting the entry into force of the Paris agreement on climate change and its implementation, and reiterating the need for global action to reduce both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants.”

Called the Fairbanks Declaration, the document says the leaders signed it “recognizing that activities taking place outside the Arctic region, including activities occurring in Arctic states, are the main contributors to climate change effects and pollution in the Arctic, and underlining the need for action at all levels.”

Continue reading “Will #KremlinGate Save Paris Agreement?”

Isis? North Korea? Russian mafia? No, but close. .

We are all riding an avalanche of cascading failures right now as the Trump administration, and the fully supportive Republican Party, devolve into rubble.
On the way down, they are still enthusiastically doing their best to kill the planet.

Is it a coincidence that the most vehement and vile Russian assets in Trump’s circle are also famously climate deniers?

Continue reading “The Most Dangerous Organization on the Planet”

If you’re interested in a good synopsis of what keeps glaciologists awake at night, this is worth your time this weekend. Add the videos I’ve plugged in here, and you’ll be well informed.

Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone:

As Alley knows better than anyone, there are many factors that control how quickly a glacier can slide into the sea, including the amount of friction on the land it is sliding through, as well as how tightly it is buttressed by ice shelves. But another big issue is the strength of the ice itself. There are many differences between the Jakobshavn Glacier and Thwaites. For one thing, Thwaites is many times larger. The calving face of Jakobshavn is only about 10 miles long, versus 90 miles at Thwaites. Also, Thwaites is not constrained in a valley the way that Jakobshavn is, which means there is little friction on the sides to slow it down. If it really gets going, it could collapse much faster than Jakobshavn. More important, Jakobshavn does not sit on the edge of a reverse-slope basin the way Thwaites does. It can calve fast, but it is not what scientists call a threshold system. Thwaites is. But one thing they do have in common is that their structural integrity – and possible future collapse – is dictated by the basic physics of ice.

Standing 300 feet tall, the ice cliffs on the calving face of Jakobshavn are the highest anywhere on the planet. As it happens, there’s good reason for that. Alley and other scientists found that ice cliffs on marine-terminating glaciers like Jakobshavn or Thwaites have a structural limit of about 300 feet – after that, they collapse because of stress and weight. So, even if there are sections on Thwaites that are 6,000 feet deep, Alley realized, the structural integrity of ice would never allow a glacier’s face to stand that tall. In other words, glaciers with a face up to 300 feet can be relatively stable; after that, forget it. As Alley puts it to me, “It’s just collapse, collapse, collapse.”

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Good Antarctic Synopsis from Rolling Stone”

Ok, not that funny, but we’ll take it. More examples.

I still think the most successful piece in the humor/climate genre belongs to John Oliver.

Leaving the Paris Agreement now would cause the US to ceed global leadership in the greatest wealth creating engines in human history.
A lot of smart people get that.

 

Reuters:

The United States will shoot itself in the foot if it quits the Paris climate accord because China, India and Europe will snap up the best power sector jobs in future, U.N. Environment chief Erik Solheim said on Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to announce as early as next week whether he will take the United States out of the climate pact, having vowed during his campaign to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement” within 100 days of becoming president.

“There is no doubt where the future is and that is what all the private sector companies have understood,” Solheim told Reuters in Geneva. “The future is green,” he said.

“Obviously if you are not a party to the Paris agreement, you will lose out. And the main losers of course will be the people of the United States itself because all the interesting, fascinating new green jobs would go to China and to the other parts of the world that are investing heavily in this.”

The world has now passed its “peak oil” stage, the Norwegian-born Solheim said, and was rapidly moving into the age of solar and wind.

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Solheim’s new target is pollution, with plastic in the oceans expected to equal the weight of fish by 2050. But with science, mobilised citizens, regulated markets, and the enormous power of business, such huge problems could be solved, he said.

The green revolution is being led by iconic firms such as Google, Walmart, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, so the momentum does not depend on Washington, Solheim said.

“Even if the worst were to happen and the United States were to withdraw, the consequences would be much less than people think,” he said.

Political leadership would shift to the European Union, China and India, and the U.N. is already talking to them about meeting the funding gap if the United States steps back – not only from the climate deal but U.N. funding in general.

New York Times:

The Trump administration may be pondering a retreat from the United States’ climate commitments, but corporate America is moving ahead with its own emissions goals.

Nearly half of the Fortune 500 biggest companies in the United States have now set targets to shrink their carbon footprints, according to a report published Tuesday by environmental organizations that monitor corporate emissions pledges. Twenty-five more companies adopted climate targets over the last two years, the groups said.

Almost two dozen companies, including Google, Walmart and Bank of America, have pledged to power their operations with 100 percent renewable energy, with varying deadlines, compared with just a handful in 2015. Google’s data centers worldwide will run entirely on renewable energyby the end of this year, the technology giant announced in December.

“We believe that climate change is real, and it’s a severe crisis,” said Gary Demasi, who directs Google’s energy strategy. “We’re not deviating from our goals.”

Continue reading “Business, Military, Energy Experts Call for US to Honor Paris Agreement”

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you know that all over America, Congressional and Senate representatives are being grilled on the unpopular components of the Donald Trump program.

Having observed organizing meetings for local “Resistance” movement groups, I’ve been struck by the emphasis that citizen’s are putting on climate change. It confirms my observation, and a considerable amount of polling data, that the climate issue has been pulsing just below the surface for a large number of citizens – but often does not show up in traditional polling, because of the way questions are usually framed.

The climate issue is not processed in the same frame as “Do I have a job?”, “Can I make my rent next month?”, and “Is my family protected by Health insurance?”. These are issues with a particular kind of urgency, that pop right to mind at pollsters prompting.

For most folks, the issue of climate and environment is an over-arching, back ground issue, that people like to feel is being handled at a level above the average person’s pay grade – it goes to core values related to how we feel about our children, our responsibility to the future, and what is the core, ground level, moral responsibility for a human being.

In the Trump era, there is no longer any assurance that people at the top have any care at all for what we previously assumed were just basic humanitarian values – such as preserving the fundamental life-support system of the planet.  People get it now, that if this job is going to get done, we have to get hands-on and do it ourselves.

Obviously events of the last day take things to a new level.

Below, a short, illuminating talk by pollster Ed Maibach, recorded in December, not long after the election, confirms what I’ve been thinking. Continue reading “New Video: At Town Halls – Citizens Confronting Climate Denial”

Above, Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, well known for pursuing and harassing climate scienctists during his tenure, (significantly, and not coincidentally, seeking scientist’s personal emails, preferred MO of Russian hackers since 2009) defends President Trump’s firing of Attorney General James Comes.

Below, Fox News stays true to their mission in disseminating distortions and confusion about what is happening.

and further, with Secretary of State and former Exxon CEO looking on approvingly, Russian foreign Minister Laptov mocks US media questions about the Comey firing.

This scares me more than arctic methane.

Climate Progress:

Depletion of dissolved oxygen in our oceans, which can cause dead zones, is occurring much faster than expected, a new study finds.

And by combining oxygen loss with ever-worsening ocean warming and acidification, humans are re-creating the conditions that led to the worst-ever extinction, which killed over 90 percent of marine life 252 million years ago.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology reviewed ocean data going back to 1958 and “found that oxygen levels started dropping in the 1980s as ocean temperatures began to climb.”

Scientists have long predicted that as carbon pollution warms the globe, the amount of oxygen in our oceans would drop, since warmer water can’t hold as much dissolved gas as colder water. And, Georgia Tech researchers point out, falling oxygen levels have recently led to more frequent low-oxygen events that “killed or displaced populations of fish, crabs and many other organisms.”

But what is especially worrisome about this new research is how quickly it is happening. “The trend of oxygen falling is about two to three times faster than what we predicted from the decrease of solubility associated with the ocean warming,” said lead researcher Prof. Taka Ito. “This is most likely due to the changes in ocean circulation and mixing associated with the heating of the near-surface waters and melting of polar ice.”

Global warming drives ocean stratification — the separation of the ocean into relatively distinct layers. This in turn speeds up oxygen loss, as explained in this the video above.

Below, my interviews with paleo experts about Earth’s extinction history.

Continue reading “Carbon Slowly Strangling Ocean”

Fortunate to interview Stephan in Carmel, CA, December 2016.

Wikipedia:

Stephan Lewandowsky (born 3 June 1958) is an Australian psychologist. He has worked in both the United States and Australia, and is currently based at the University of Bristol, UK, where he is the chair in cognitive psychology at the School of Experimental Psychology.^[2] His research, which originally pertained to computer simulations of people’s decision-making processes, has recently focused on the public’s understanding of science and why people often embrace beliefs that are sharply at odds with the scientific evidence.

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Lewandowsky has published a number of studies examining people’s belief in misinformation. In 2005, he was the lead author of a study which investigated people’s beliefs in assertions about the Iraq War that had actually been retracted, and which examined people’s beliefs about these assertions in Australia, the United States, and Germany. He and his co-authors found that American participants in the study persisted in believing the assertions even after being informed that they had been retracted.^[7]Lewandowsky told the Wall Street Journal that the original misinformation had already become a part of the Americans’ mental worldview by the time it was retracted. He also noted that “People who were not suspicious of the motives behind the war continued to rely on misinformation.”