by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, September 26, 2014
LONDON − The Arctic ice cap has just passed its summer minimum – and it’s the sixth lowest measure of sea ice recorded since 1978, according to scientists at the US space agency NASA.
For three decades, the shrinking Arctic ice – and the growing area of clear blue water exposed each summer – has been a cause of increasing alarm to climate scientists.
Polar seasonal changes are measured annually by NASA, but reliable satellite data goes back only to 1978, For much of the 20th century, the Arctic was part of the Cold War zone, so only Soviet naval icebreakers and US nuclear submarines took consistent measurements − and neither side published the data.
But studies of 17th and 18th century whaling ships’ logbooks and other records make it clear that the ice once stretched much further south each summer than it does today.
Steady decline
In the last 30 years, the thickness and the area of the ice have both been in steady decline, with predictions that in a few decades the Arctic Ocean could be virtually ice free by September, opening up new sea routes between Asia and Europe.
This year could have been worse, although the area of ice fell to little more than 5 million square kilometres − significantly below the 1981−2010 average of 6.22 million sq km.
“The summer started off relatively cool, and lacked the big storms or persistent winds that can break up ice and increase melting,” said Walter Meier, a research scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. “Even with a relatively cool year, the ice is so much thinner than it used to be. It is more susceptible to melting.”
Warming in the Arctic is likely to affect climate patterns in the temperate zones, and the state of the polar ice has become of such concern that researchers are using ground-based and sea-based monitors to explore the physics of the phenomenon.
But there is another reason for the attention: as polar ice diminishes, so does the planet’s albedo − its ability to reflect sunlight back into space.
So, as the ice shrinks, the seas warm, making it more difficult for new ice to form. And greater exposure to sunlight increases the probability that permafrost will thaw, releasing even more greenhouse gases locked in the frozen soils.
Now researchers have found another and unexpected example of climate feedback that could affect the cycle of warming. Climate scientist Dorte Haubjerg Søgaard, of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the University of Southern Denmark, and research colleagues have discovered that sea ice itself is an agency that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
That the oceans absorb the stuff, and tuck it away as calcium carbonate or other marine minerals, is old news.
“But we also thought that this did not apply to ocean areas covered by ice, because the ice was considered impenetrable,” Søgaard said. “However, new research shows that sea ice in the Arctic draws large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean.”
The research is published in four journals, Polar Biology, The Cryosphere, the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and Marine Ecology Progress Series.
Two-stage pattern
The Danish research team observed a complex, two-stage pattern of gas exchange as ice floes formed off southern Greenland. They measured the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the formation and release of calcium carbonate crystals form in the sea ice, and kept a tally during a 71-day cycle of the carbon dioxide budget.
In the course of this complicated bit of natural cryo-chemistry, they found that some CO2 was carried deep into the ocean with dense, heavy brines, as the ice froze and some was captured by algae in the thawing ice.
They also identified a third factor: the “frost flowers” that formed on the new ice had an unexpectedly high concentration of calcium carbonate.
The profit-and-loss accounting meant that every square metre of ice effectively removed 56 milligrams of carbon from the atmosphere during the 71-day cycle. Over an area of 5 million sq km, this would represent a significant uptake.
But the real importance of the discovery is that scientists have identified yet another way in which the ice – while it is there – helps keep the Arctic cold, and yet another way in which carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans.
“If our results are representative, then the sea ice plays a greater role than expected, and we should take account of this in future global CO2 budgets,” Søgaard said.
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2014
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September
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- Global warming is melting increasingly larger area...
- High-Techs Abandon ALEC, Fossil and Tobacco Wolf I...
- Future warmer may lead to fewer harvests even with...
- Global sea levels rose up to 5 meters per century ...
- Bill Moyers: Climate Change: The Next Generation
- Google chairman on ALEC: 'They’re just literally l...
- REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE...
- Mark Hertsgaard: The People’s Climate March Was Hu...
- Today, 310,000 people took to the streets of New Y...
- Stephan Lewandowsky Arctic sea ice bucket challeng...
- Mauri Pelto -- Climate Scientist Hunk of the Month...
- Leonardo DiCaprio: We already knew there is a clim...
- Livestreaming Peoples Climate March! Announcing Pe...
- Joe Romm: NOAA: With Hottest August On Record, 201...
- Peter Sinclair: Jason Box, "We're f'd"
- Joe Romm: This Changes Everything: Naomi Klein Is ...
- Joe Romm: George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace...
- Amazon rainforest deforestation in Brazil drastica...
- 'Wake Up Call Sounded' on Climate, University Facu...
- Brazil says rate of Amazon deforestation up for fi...
- Arctic Sea sediment cores going back 200,000 years...
- ABSOLUTELY MUST SEE VIDEO OF GREENLAND WITH JASON ...
- Wettest Day Ever in Phoenix
- 97 HOURS OF CLIMATE CONSENSUS: JOHN COOK RULES!!!
- Nestlé: How climate change is affecting the world’...
- Robert Schribbler: It’s All About Fresh Water — Ra...
- John Mashey: Did Lennart Bengtsson Know Global War...
- Conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts counting down to...
- Reuters investigates sea level rise. Water's Edge:...
- In Washington, DC, the Summer of 2010 Was So Hot I...
- As the Arctic warms, sunlight will cause even more...
- Cuba and sea level rise
- Invaluable briefing series unpacks climate change ...
- Daily Mail touts McKitrick study using cherry-pick...
- Risk of 50-year megadrought in Southwest at 5-10%
- Peter Sinclair: Is the Polar Vortex a Product of C...
- Keeling Curve Saved! Wendy and Eric Schmidt Award ...
- Australian insurance industry a stronghold against...
- Dr.Michael Mann's DC Appeals Court brief lays out ...
- EPA MAY FORCE DRILLERS TO CUT METHANE LEAKS,
- Zen and the art of wildflower science
- The Guardian: Limits to Growth was right. New rese...
- The Guardian: Two secret funders of Nigel Lawson’s...
- DeSmog UK: Exposed: Lawson’s Climate Denial Donors...
- NewScientist: No more pause: Global warming will b...
- MUST READ: Nigel Lawson: An Honourable Man [yeah, ...
- Brazil Vows Water Supply Is Under Control as Basin...
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Friday, September 26, 2014
Thursday, September 25, 2014
High-Techs Abandon ALEC, Fossil and Tobacco Wolf In Business Suit
by John Mashey, DeSmogBlog, September 25, 2014
As Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Yelp and other high-tech Silicon Valley companies abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a few facts need more emphasis to understand this wolf in business clothes, bringing “sample bills” to legislatures.
ALEC is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) “public charity,” as per its IRS Form 990s. Donations to it get tax breaks. Common Cause filed complaints against ALEC in 2012 and 2013, but these take years, as do similar complaints related to Fakery 2: More Funny Finances, Free of Tax.
High-tech companies finally noticed problems with climate change policies at ALEC, unsurprising given the strong influence of fossil energy companies. But companies also were effectively side-by-side with Big Tobacco, whose continued existence requires nicotine addiction of adolescents, which only works by “rewiring” the brain during rapid development that ends by age 25 or usually earlier.
ALEC includes the usual think tanks that attack science and support both industries. Does ALEC have a monopoly on access to power? Can reasonable business people find no representation except through a group that is often anti-science, anti-environment and anti-health?
Perhaps high-tech companies mis-hired people in Washington, DC, offices, as it was strange to see Google donating to CEI or hosting a James Inhofe fundraiser.
Perhaps ALEC promoted itself as a sensible business advocate, akin to the well-known Silicon Valley Leadership Group, but ALEC is a different sort of animal.
Some companies seek to privatize profits and socialize (high) costs, risks or damage, so they naturally seek to “hide in the crowd” with others, use front groups or foster the TEA Party. They need camouflage, especially Big Tobacco, from whom others have learned.
Perhaps ALEC promoted itself as a sensible business advocate, akin to the well-known Silicon Valley Leadership Group, but ALEC is a different sort of animal.
Some companies seek to privatize profits and socialize (high) costs, risks or damage, so they naturally seek to “hide in the crowd” with others, use front groups or foster the TEA Party. They need camouflage, especially Big Tobacco, from whom others have learned.
ALEC and Big Tobacco
The PDF at Fakery 2, p.37 and 41 mentions ALEC as a recipient of tobacco money, but that was the tip of the iceberg. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library stores millions of internal documents from tobacco companies.
A search for American Legislative Exchange Council finds 25,000 documents, a hint at the long close connection, as seen also in this post elsewhere.
A search for American Legislative Exchange Council finds 25,000 documents, a hint at the long close connection, as seen also in this post elsewhere.
Just like the other groups in Familiar Think Tanks Fight For E-Cigarettes, ALEChas helped Big Tobacco for decades, but recently has become concerned with health and wants to avoid higher taxes or restrictions on e-cigarettes or other nicotine products.
Of course, higher taxes selectively discourage adolescent purchases, a serious challenge for tobacco's long-term customer base.
Of course, higher taxes selectively discourage adolescent purchases, a serious challenge for tobacco's long-term customer base.
Although slightly out of date, Wikipedia has a list of members, as does SourceWatch. The Corporate Board includes Altria, ExxonMobil, Koch, Peabody Energy, for example.
An ALEC wolf would be more obvious without a crowd as camouflage, so let's hope more companies find better routes to cooperation with governments.
Future warmer may lead to fewer harvests even with more land for agriculture
New research shows that the complex balance of gains and losses caused by climate change could mean more land being available for agriculture − but fewer harvests.
by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, September 25, 2014
LONDON − With climate change, you win some, you lose some. New research shows that suitable new cropland could become available in the high latitudes as the world warms − but tropical regions may become less productive.
Florian Zabel and two fellow-geographers from Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, report in the journal Public Library of Science One that they made judgments about the climate, soil and topography to suit the 16 most important food and energy crops. They then compared data for the period 1981−2010 with simulations of a warming world for the period 2071−2100.
The results looked good: in northern Canada, China and Russia, they found that a notional additional land area of 5.6 million sq km became available for crops.
Significant losses
Less happily, in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa there were significant losses of agricultural productivity – if no additional irrigation was factored in. Also, the chances of multiple harvests in tropical Brazil, Asia and Central Africa would be reduced.
Altogether, the land suitable for agriculture by 2100 would total 54 million sq km. But of this, 91% is already under cultivation.
“Much of the additional area is, however, at best only moderately suited to agricultural use, so the proportion of highly fertile land suited to agricultural use will decrease,” Dr Zabel says.
“In the context of current projections, which predict that the demand for food will double by the year 2050 as the result of population increase, our results are quite alarming.”
The Munich calculations were essentially mathematical projections based on climate models that are, in turn, based on broad conclusions of change. But what if those broad conclusions are too sweeping?
Climate researcher Peter Greve, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that the rule of thumb for climate change – that wet regions will tend to get wetter, and already dry regions will in general become more arid – may not always hold.
So they looked at the calculations again, and began to search for trends towards increasing humidity or aridity.
In effect, they were trying to see if they could predict what should have happened in the past, so they chose two periods − 1948 to 1968, and 1984 to 2004 − and examined the patterns of change.
Clear trends
They could find no obvious trend towards either a wetter or a drier climate over about three-quarters of the land area under consideration. There were clear trends for the remaining quarter, but, once again, the answers were not simple. In about half of this land area, the dry-gets-drier, wet-gets-wetter rule seemed to hold. In the other half, the trends seemed to be contradictory.
In the past, parts of the Amazon, Central America, tropical Africa and Asia should have got wetter, but instead became less moist. Patagonia, central Australia and the US Midwest were all dry areas that became wetter.
The wet-gets-wetter rule held good for the eastern US, northern Australia and northern Eurasia, and the already dry Sahel, Arabian Peninsula and parts of central Asia and Australia became more parched.
The lesson is not that climate projections are wrong, but that climate systems are very complex. “Our results emphasise how we should not overly rely on simplifying principles to assess past developments in dryness and humidity,” Greve says.
by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, September 25, 2014
LONDON − With climate change, you win some, you lose some. New research shows that suitable new cropland could become available in the high latitudes as the world warms − but tropical regions may become less productive.
Florian Zabel and two fellow-geographers from Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, report in the journal Public Library of Science One that they made judgments about the climate, soil and topography to suit the 16 most important food and energy crops. They then compared data for the period 1981−2010 with simulations of a warming world for the period 2071−2100.
The results looked good: in northern Canada, China and Russia, they found that a notional additional land area of 5.6 million sq km became available for crops.
Significant losses
Less happily, in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa there were significant losses of agricultural productivity – if no additional irrigation was factored in. Also, the chances of multiple harvests in tropical Brazil, Asia and Central Africa would be reduced.
Altogether, the land suitable for agriculture by 2100 would total 54 million sq km. But of this, 91% is already under cultivation.
“Much of the additional area is, however, at best only moderately suited to agricultural use, so the proportion of highly fertile land suited to agricultural use will decrease,” Dr Zabel says.
“In the context of current projections, which predict that the demand for food will double by the year 2050 as the result of population increase, our results are quite alarming.”
The Munich calculations were essentially mathematical projections based on climate models that are, in turn, based on broad conclusions of change. But what if those broad conclusions are too sweeping?
Climate researcher Peter Greve, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that the rule of thumb for climate change – that wet regions will tend to get wetter, and already dry regions will in general become more arid – may not always hold.
So they looked at the calculations again, and began to search for trends towards increasing humidity or aridity.
In effect, they were trying to see if they could predict what should have happened in the past, so they chose two periods − 1948 to 1968, and 1984 to 2004 − and examined the patterns of change.
Clear trends
They could find no obvious trend towards either a wetter or a drier climate over about three-quarters of the land area under consideration. There were clear trends for the remaining quarter, but, once again, the answers were not simple. In about half of this land area, the dry-gets-drier, wet-gets-wetter rule seemed to hold. In the other half, the trends seemed to be contradictory.
In the past, parts of the Amazon, Central America, tropical Africa and Asia should have got wetter, but instead became less moist. Patagonia, central Australia and the US Midwest were all dry areas that became wetter.
The wet-gets-wetter rule held good for the eastern US, northern Australia and northern Eurasia, and the already dry Sahel, Arabian Peninsula and parts of central Asia and Australia became more parched.
The lesson is not that climate projections are wrong, but that climate systems are very complex. “Our results emphasise how we should not overly rely on simplifying principles to assess past developments in dryness and humidity,” Greve says.
Global sea levels rose up to 5 meters per century at the end of the last five ice age cycles
from phys.org, September 25, 2014
Credit: Tiago Fioreze / Wikipedia
Land-ice decay at the end of the last five ice-ages caused global sea-levels to rise at rates of up to 5.5 metres per century, according to a new study.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-global-sea-rose-meters-century.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-global-sea-rose-meters-century.html
Land-ice decay at the end of the last five ice-ages caused global sea-levels to rise at rates of up to 5.5 metres per century, according to a new study.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-global-sea-rose-meters-century.html#jCp
An international team of researchers developed a 500,000-year record of sea-level variability, to provide the first account of how quickly sea-level changed during the last five ice-age cycles.
The results, published in the latest issue of Nature Communications, also found that more than 100 smaller events of sea-level rise took place in between the five major events.
Dr Katharine Grant, from the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, who led the study, says: "The really fast rates of sea-level rise typically seem to have happened at the end of periods with exceptionally large ice sheets, when there was two or more times more ice on the Earth than today.
"Time periods with less than twice the modern global ice volume show almost no indications of sea-level rise faster than about 2 metres per century. Those with close to the modern amount of ice on Earth, show rates of up to 1 to 1.5 metres per century." [Note, however, that there is no past analogue for the current forcing of the climate.]
Co-author Professor Eelco Rohling, of both the University of Southampton and ANU, explains that the study also sheds light on the timescales of change. He says: "For the first time, we have data from a sufficiently large set of events to systematically study the timescale over which ice-sheet responses developed from initial change to maximum retreat."
"This happened within 400 years for 68% of all 120 cases considered, and within 1,100 years for 95%. In other words, once triggered, ice-sheet reduction (and therefore sea-level rise) kept accelerating relentlessly over periods of many centuries."
Professor Rohling speculates that there may be an important lesson for our future: "Man-made warming spans 150 years already and studies have documented clear increases in mass-loss from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Once under way, this response may be irreversible for many centuries to come."
The team reconstructed sea-levels using data from sediment cores from the Red Sea, an area that is very sensitive to sea-level changes because its only natural connection with the open (Indian) ocean is through the very shallow (137 metre) Bab-el-Mandab Strait. These sediment samples record wind-blown dust variations, which the team linked to a well-dated climate record from Chinese stalagmites. Due to a common process, both dust and stalagmite records show a pronounced change at the end of each ice age, which allowed the team to date the sea-level record in detail.
The researchers emphasise that their values for sea-level change are 500-year averages, so brief pulses of faster change cannot be excluded.
Explore further: Antarctica could raise sea level faster than previously thought
More information: "Sea-level variability over five glacial cycles" Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomm6076
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-global-sea-rose-meters-century.html
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Bill Moyers: Climate Change: The Next Generation
by Moyers & Company, September 19, 2014
As world leaders converge for the UN’s global summit on climate and thousands gather in New York for the People’s Climate March, Bill talks to 18-year-old Oregonian Kelsey Juliana, who is walking across America to draw attention to global warming.
Kelsey Juliana comes by her activism naturally – her parents met in the 1990s while fighting the logging industry’s destruction of old growth forests and she attended her first protest when she was two months old.
Now just out of high school, she’s co-plaintiff in a major lawsuit being spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust that could force the state of Oregon to take a more aggressive stance against the carbon emissions warming the earth and destroying the environment. She’s walking across America as part of the Great March for Climate Action, due to arrive in Washington, DC, on November 1.
“You don’t have to call yourself an activist to act,” she says. “I think that’s so important that people my age really get [that] into their heads. As a younger person, I have everything to gain from taking action and everything to lose from not… It’s important that youth are the ones who are standing up because of the fact that we do have so much to lose.”
Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Sikay Tang. Outro Producer: Lena Shemel. Outro Editor: Rob Kuhns.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Google chairman on ALEC: 'They’re just literally lying'
Eric Schmidt
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt indicated in an interview Monday with NPR's Diane Rehm that Google would drop its ALEC membership "in the future," but did not specify a date.Google is a member of ALEC's Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force and sticks out like a sore thumb, with its famous "don't be evil" ethos, on that massive list of corporate supporters of the organization. That's led Google to be one of the primary targets for activists trying to get these companies to dump ALEC. Microsoft left ALEC last month, joining large corporations like Coca-Cola, General Motors, Bank of America, and Proctor & Gamble who have all said they will leave the group."We funded them as part of a political [campaign] of something unrelated," Schmidt said in response to a caller asking if Google "is still supporting" the influential conservative organization. "I think the consensus within the company was that that was some sort of mistake, and so we're trying to not do that in the future."Rehm then asked Schmidt why Google first involved itself with ALEC."Well, the company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts—what a shock," Schmidt said. "And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they're just, they're just literally lying."
You can read more discussion in cooper888's diary.
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______
For Immediate Release September 23, 2014
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT
United Nations Headquarters
New York, New York
1:03 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow leaders: For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week -- terrorism, instability, inequality, disease
-- there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.
Five years have passed since many of us met in Copenhagen. And since then, our understanding of climate change has advanced -- both in the deepening science that says this once-distant threat has moved “firmly into the present,” and into the sting of more frequent extreme weather events that show us exactly what these changes may mean for future generations.
No nation is immune. In America, the past decade has been our hottest on record. Along our eastern coast, the city of Miami now floods at high tide. In our west, wildfire season now stretches most of the year. In our heartland, farms have been parched by the worst drought in generations, and drenched by the wettest spring in our history. A hurricane left parts of this great city dark and underwater. And some nations already live with far worse. Worldwide, this summer was the hottest ever recorded -- with global carbon emissions still on the rise.
So the climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it. The alarm bells keep ringing. Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call. We know what we have to do to avoid irreparable harm. We have to cut carbon pollution in our own countries to prevent the worst effects of climate change. We have to adapt to the impacts that, unfortunately, we can no longer avoid. And we have to work together as a global community to tackle this global threat before it is too late.
We cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair. Not when we have the means -- the technological innovation and the scientific imagination -- to begin the work of repairing it right now.
As one of America’s governors has said, “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.” So today, I’m here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second largest emitter, to say that we have begun to do something about it.
The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions. We now harness three times as much electricity from the wind and 10 times as much from the sun as we did when I came into office. Within a decade, our cars will go twice as far on a gallon of gas, and already, every major automaker offers electric vehicles. We’ve made unprecedented investments to cut energy waste in our homes and our buildings and our appliances, all of which will save consumers billions of dollars. And we are committed to helping communities build climate-resilient infrastructure.
So, all told, these advances have helped create jobs, grow our economy, and drive our carbon pollution to its lowest levels in nearly two decades -- proving that there does not have to be a conflict between a sound environment and strong economic growth.
Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth. But we have to do more. Last year, I issued America’s first Climate Action Plan to double down on our efforts. Under that plan, my administration is working with states and utilities to set first-ever standards to cut the amount of carbon pollution our power plants can dump into the air. And when completed, this will mark the single most important and significant step the United States has ever taken to reduce our carbon emissions.
Last week alone, we announced an array of new actions in renewable energy and energy efficiency that will save consumers more than $10 billion on their energy bills and cut carbon pollution by nearly 300 million metric tons through 2030. That's the equivalent of taking more than 60 million cars off the road for one year.
I also convened a group of private sector leaders who’ve agreed to do their part to slash consumption of dangerous greenhouse gases known as HFCs -- slash them 80 percent by 2050.
And already, more than 100 nations have agreed to launch talks to phase down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol -- the same agreement the world used successfully to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals.
This is something that President Xi of China and I have worked on together. Just a few minutes ago, I met with Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, and reiterated my belief that as the two largest economies and emitters in the world, we have a special responsibility to lead. That’s what big nations have to do. (Applause.)
And today, I call on all countries to join us -– not next year, or the year after, but right now, because no nation can meet this global threat alone. The United States has also engaged more allies and partners to cut carbon pollution and prepare for the impacts we cannot avoid. All told, American climate assistance now reaches more than 120 nations around the world. We’re helping more nations skip past the dirty phase of development, using current technologies, not duplicating the same mistakes and environmental degradation that took place previously.
We’re partnering with African entrepreneurs to launch clean energy projects. We’re helping farmers practice climate-smart agriculture and plant more durable crops. We’re building international coalitions to drive action, from reducing methane emissions from pipelines to launching a free trade agreement for environmental goods. And we have been working shoulder-to-shoulder with many of you to make the Green Climate Fund a reality.
But let me be honest. None of this is without controversy. In each of our countries, there are interests that will be resistant to action. And in each country, there is a suspicion that if we act and other countries don't that we will be at an economic disadvantage. But we have to lead. That is what the United Nations and this General Assembly is about.
Now, the truth is, is that no matter what we do, some populations will still be at risk. The nations that contribute the least to climate change often stand to lose the most. And that’s why, since I took office, the United States has expanded our direct adaptation assistance eightfold, and we’re going to do more.
Today, I’m directing our federal agencies to begin factoring climate resilience into our international development programs and investments. And I’m announcing a new effort to deploy the unique scientific and technological capabilities of the United States, from climate data to early-warning systems. So this effort includes a new partnership that will draw on the resources and expertise of our leading private sector companies and philanthropies to help vulnerable nations better prepare for weather-related disasters, and better plan for long-term threats like steadily rising seas.
Yes, this is hard. But there should be no question that the United States of America is stepping up to the plate. We recognize our role in creating this problem; we embrace our responsibility to combat it. We will do our part, and we will help developing nations do theirs. But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation –- developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass.
The emerging economies that have experienced some of the most dynamic growth in recent years have also emitted rising levels of carbon pollution. It is those emerging economies that are likely to produce more and more carbon emissions in the years to come. So nobody can stand on the sidelines on this issues. We have to set aside the old divides. We have to raise our collective ambition, each of us doing what we can to confront this global challenge.
This time, we need an agreement that reflects economic realities in the next decade and beyond. It must be ambitious –- because that’s what the scale of this challenge demands. It must be inclusive –- because every country must play its part. And, yes, it must be flexible –- because different nations have different circumstances.
Five years ago, I pledged America would reduce our carbon emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. America will meet that target. And by early next year, we will put forward our next emission target, reflecting our confidence in the ability of our technological entrepreneurs and scientific innovators to lead the way.
So today, I call on all major economies to do the same. For I believe, in the words of Dr. King, that there is such a thing as being too late. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate while we still can.
This challenge demands our ambition. Our children deserve such ambition. And if we act now, if we can look beyond the swarm of current events and some of the economic challenges and political challenges involved, if we place the air that our children will breathe and the food that they will eat and the hopes and dreams of all posterity above our own short-term interests, we may not be too late for them.
While you and I may not live to see all the fruits of our labor, we can act to see that the century ahead is marked not by conflict, but by cooperation; not by human suffering, but by human progress; and that the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children, will be cleaner and healthier, and more prosperous and secure.
Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
Monday, September 22, 2014
Mark Hertsgaard: The People’s Climate March Was Huge, but Will It Change Everything?
Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of New York and cities around the world on Sunday, but the fight for climate justice is only beginning
by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, September 21, 2014
by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, September 21, 2014
Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City on Sunday calling for “climate justice” in the largest mass protest to date against government and corporate inaction to limit the overheating of the planet. Organizers of the People’s Climate March claimed that in addition to the New York march some 2,676 other demonstrations were held in 146 countries, including a march of 30,000 people in London that was televised to the New York crowd on a giant screen set up on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street. “We said it would take everyone to change everything, and everyone showed up,” said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, one of the central groups that organized the march.
The march featured an unprecedented diversity of participants, including many thousands of union members as well as representatives from indigenous people’s organizations, students and faith groups, and even a contingent of business types marching behind an “Investors for Climate Solutions” banner. Proceeding without any violence under a muggy, cloudy sky, the demonstration kicked off Climate Week in New York City. World leaders, including President Obama, will gather at the United Nations on Tuesday for a one-day climate summit intended to build momentum toward signing an ambitious global agreement at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015. On Monday, protesters plan to “Flood Wall Street” to demand that investors shift assets from climate-destructive fossil fuels to solar, wind and other forms of clean energy.
Some big investors will beat “Flood Wall Street” to the punch: on Monday, a collection of institutional investors that manage $50 billion among themselves will announce that they will divest entirely from fossil fuels. Prominent among the group is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose assets were accumulated by the Rockefeller family’s many decades of producing petroleum, first under the Standard Oil brand and later under Exxon. “John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, moved America out of whale oil and into petroleum,” explained Stephen Heintz, President of the Fund. “We are quite convinced that if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy.”
“One announcement alone isn’t going to tip the balance, but when one announcement is followed by another and then another, that gets CEOs to pay attention,” Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist who has funded numerous electoral campaigns on behalf of climate action, told The Nation. “CEOs pay a lot of attention to their shareholders, just like everyone pays attention to what their boss thinks. So actions like this send a powerful message.”
Visually, the most striking aspect of the People’s Climate March was its racial diversity and preponderance of young people. The first line of marchers to head south from Columbus Circle were fifteen high school and college age youths, nearly all of them African-American or Latino, wearing orange T-shirts that announced they represented the Rockaway Youth Task Force. Rockaway, a peninsula in Queens that borders the Atlantic Ocean, was brutalized by Hurricane Sandy in November 2012; some residents at the march carried signs asserting that they had been left without electricity for fifteen days after the storm, even as Wall Street was back up and running in seventy-two hours. The highlighting of so-called “front-line communities” was international: later in the march, protesters carried blue umbrellas, two storeys high, with the names of other people and places that have been displaced by climate violence: “Island Nations,” “Public Housing,” “People of Color,” “Renters.”
Labor union members were also an unmistakable presence, perhaps the largest single contingent in the march. “Today we make history. This is your Woodstock. This is the day our children will remember us for,” Chris Erikson, the business manager of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, told a labor rally at 58th and Broadway, standing beneath a banner proclaiming, “Healthy Planet and Good Jobs.” Separately, Erikson told The Nation, “The free market can work but it needs to be regulated. We want our politicians to figure out how to transition to a clean energy economy. You can’t just shut down coal mines and power plants without knowing where the green jobs to replace them will come from. And we’re going to hold them accountable on that.”
Mike Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, reminded the union rally that labor and environmentalists weren’t always on opposite sides. “I’m proud to be here today because we know it was the labor movement that put up the bail money to get Martin Luther King Jr. out of the Birmingham jail,” said Brune, whose organization was the first to attempt to revive, in the 1990s, ties between environmental and labor activism. “And it was the labor movement that provided money to organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and to build the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. And we know that the same companies that are poisoning our air and water are also poisoning our democracy. So we at the Sierra Club stand with you for a clean energy economy that puts millions of people to work.”
Many veteran activists of the climate movement expressed the same overjoyed reaction to this march as did Annie Leonard, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA, who recently returned to the organization after eighteen years away: finally, the climate movement is getting serious about building political power. “The organizing for this march looks very different than most environmental organizing twenty years ago did,” she told The Nation. “This march is led by environmental justice groups and includes nurses, farmers, labor organizers, young people and activists working on immigrant rights, economic equality and indigenous rights. The movement is more broad and inclusive than ever. If we environmentalists had done real power-building work like this twenty years ago, we wouldn’t be in this climate mess we’re in now. The window for action is closing, but a day like this gives me hope that we’ll make it.”
“Today is enormously exciting, not just the size of the march but how many young people are here,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said. “It shows that young people are not turned off to politics. And given the power of corporations in our country, the only way we’ll get the change we need on climate change or any other issue is if millions of people take to the streets and demand change.”
You can find video and photos of the People’s Climate March, and its sister demonstrations around the world, at the march website: peoplesclimate.org. But for additional flavor of what it was like on the street, here is a baker’s dozen of some of the signs and banners on display:
“If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved.”“If it’s melted, it’s ruined,” displayed next to a huge Mother Earth float, courtesy of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.“Got Kids?”“Compost Capitalism”“Climate Change Affects Us Most” and “We Didn’t Cause This Mess,” carried by children marching with the Kids and Families contingent.“Our Demands Are Not Radical”“Act Like You Live Here”“Dumbledore Wouldn’t Let This Happen”“Rising Tides, Rising Rents, Rising People”“Another Teamster for Green Jobs”“Teach Our Youth Science, They Will Need It”“It’s Sunday, I’m Missing Football, This Shit Is Important”“Tax Carbon, Pay People”
Read Next: Naomi Klein explains how climate change can be a people’s shock.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Today, 310,000 people took to the streets of New York City to call for climate action
From: Jamie Henn 350@350.org
Date: September 21, 2014
Subject: Beautiful in a way I couldn't have imagined.
Reply-To: 350@350.org
Date: September 21, 2014
Subject: Beautiful in a way I couldn't have imagined.
Reply-To: 350@350.org
Friends,
This is what hope looks like:
Today, 310,000 people took to the streets of New York City to call for climate action -- the largest climate march in history. And we were joined by hundreds of thousands of others around the world at over 2646 events in 156 countries.
And on Tuesday, the world’s politicians will gather in New York to talk about climate action -- 125 heads of state in total. They’ll be gathering with the knowledge that more people than ever are demanding action, not just words, and that their political future is on the line -- as well as the future of the planet.
We will bring that message to the top leadership of the UN inside Tuesday’s summit, with a hand-delivered message to top UN climate negotiators.
If you stand with the hundreds of thousands of people who marched today around the world, tell world leaders that you mean business: act.350.org/letter/ready-for-action/
Today people from the communities where fossil fuels are dug up marched alongside people who live where they are burned. Thousands of workers, the people who stand ready to build a clean, renewable energy system, walked alongside indigenous communities that are already leading with their own climate solutions. New Yorkers, including those whose homes were wrecked by Superstorm Sandy, marched in huge numbers, standing alongside international ambassadors from communities responding to climate disasters worldwide.
Organizing a big march is like throwing a rock in a pond: the splash is exciting, but the real beauty is in the ripples. And the ripples of the People’s Climate Mobilization are already spreading. A people’s summit outlining the path to a just transition away from fossil fuels starts tomorrow, along with actions targeting corporate polluters in New York.
With your help those ripples can spread further, and strengthen -- and on Tuesday, hopefully help rock world leaders into action, where they have only offered words before.
I want you to take a moment to appreciate the importance of what happened today. We are mobilizing at the scale that science and justice demand, and it is beautiful in a way we could not have imagined.
Now our work continues -- and nothing will be the same.
With hope,
Jamie
Above photo from @cynryan on Twitter
Stephan Lewandowsky Arctic sea ice bucket challenge, with help from John Cook!
Stephan Lewandowsky - Arctic Sea Ice Bucket challenge
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Mauri Pelto -- Climate Scientist Hunk of the Month does the ice bucket challenge!
Mauri Pelto responding to Peter Sinclair challenge, September 20, 2014
[Apologies to Mauri, but I couldn't resist.]
For a view of Mauri's awesome work in glaciology have a good look at his famed blog "From a Glacier's Perspective":
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/
[Apologies to Mauri, but I couldn't resist.]
For a view of Mauri's awesome work in glaciology have a good look at his famed blog "From a Glacier's Perspective":
http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/
Leonardo DiCaprio: We already knew there is a climate crisis. What most people don’t know is that it could rapidly accelerate because of the thaw and release of methane in the Arctic.
“We already knew there is a climate crisis. What most people don’t know is that it could rapidly accelerate because of the thaw and release of methane in the Arctic. We need immediate action to reverse this trend before it’s too late.” - Leonardo DiCaprio, narrator of Green World Rising, a series of episodes on the state of climate and solutions to the climate crisis.
Episode 1 - CARBON shows how we can keep carbon in the ground through putting a price on carbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pP-Twj2lzB8
Episode 2 - LAST HOURS - the real threat of the release of methane from the melting arctic, thus triggering an extreme climate change event.https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=2bRrg96UtMc
Episode 3 - Green World Rising shows our pathway forward through renewable technology that decentralizes the current power grid.
Episode 4 - Restoration discusses how the earth's natural ecosystems deal with climate and how we can work with nature to turn the tide.
http://www.greenworldrising. org/
Green World Rising is brought to you by Tree Media with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. The series is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, presented by Thom Hartmann and directed by Leila Conners. Executive Producers are George DiCaprio, Earl Katz and Roee Sharon Peled, and produced by Mathew Schmid.
Episode 1 - CARBON shows how we can keep carbon in the ground through putting a price on carbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Episode 2 - LAST HOURS - the real threat of the release of methane from the melting arctic, thus triggering an extreme climate change event.https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Episode 3 - Green World Rising shows our pathway forward through renewable technology that decentralizes the current power grid.
Episode 4 - Restoration discusses how the earth's natural ecosystems deal with climate and how we can work with nature to turn the tide.
http://www.greenworldrising.
Green World Rising is brought to you by Tree Media with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. The series is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, presented by Thom Hartmann and directed by Leila Conners. Executive Producers are George DiCaprio, Earl Katz and Roee Sharon Peled, and produced by Mathew Schmid.
Carbon
CARBON is the first film in the Green World Rising Series. http://www.greenworldrising.
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