Climate Scientist James Hansen and Bill McKibben Talk Together About Dangerous Climate Change
James Hansen tells Bill McKibben “science demands actual reductions in fossil fuel emissions, not phony offsets.” He may bring suit against the US government on behalf of his grandchildren.
A New Magazine From 350.org: The Solutions Journal
“The Solutions Journal” from 350.org is one the best resources for climate change and energy problem solving. Period. No matter how much you know now, you can learn from this magazine.
Is the Climate Emergency Boring You? It Shouldn’t
In facing the climate emergency, thanks to our long evolutionary past, we humans are first visceral, then emotional, and only finally are we rational.
The climate emergency is getting closer every day, whether or not people have registered, and the only rational response is to persist with public education, persist with political lobbying, persist with the warnings, and persist with the vision of a world that can flourish without fossil fuels, air pollution, tar-sands, and oil-fueled terrorism.
White House Will Have Solar Panels Installed, After All
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announces that the White House will install solar panels on the roof and a solar water heater
“Cap and Trade” Would Make Getting to Zero Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Impossible
Jean Matlack, one of our trusted 350.org organizers in Maine, recently wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Bangor Daily News which was published on April 13. Her letter, titled “Cap and Dividend might work”, stresses the importance of passing effective climate legislation in the U.S. as soon as possible, and goes on to explain why the cap-and-dividend approach, proposed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, could fit the bill (no pun intended). Please take a moment to read her letter, posted below, and consider writing a Letter to the Editor of your own local newspaper. We can’t afford to stay silent when it comes to solving the climate crisis, so now is the perfect time to get your ideas and opinions published.
A CLIMATE LIFEBOAT AT SEA
While compromising your standards in dealing with misinformed, dishonest or incompetent politicians may make you look good to them, this won’t gain you much respect or credibility with your children and grandchildren, who will be forced to live with future climate change, exacerbated by the lack of meaningful action today. We should approach the great task before us with passion and concern – and not be afraid to show it.
Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).
What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.
Can you sit in a snowstorm and imagine a warming world?
The weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms. Here’s how it works: In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.
But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren’t trivial — global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of “extreme events” such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.
Important Resource Material on Carbon Targets, With Links to Dynamic Post-Copenhagen Efforts
The pledges made by governments resulting from the Copenhagen climate conference are nowhere near enough to hold global temperatures to the summit’s agreed goal of no more than a 2C rise, researchers have calculated. The results, which are the most rigorous analyses yet made of pledges submitted to the UN last month, will increase pressure on rich countries to make far deeper cuts in negotiations over the next year. Researchers from the Sustainability Institute, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Ventana Systems in the US conclude that emissions reduction pledges would allow global mean temperature to increase approximately 3.9C, a level that could see global warming run out of control. “Under the current proposals, global emissions of greenhouse gases would increase 0.8C a year between now and 2020, warned the joint report. It concluded that to reach the Copenhagen accord’s goal of no more than a 2C rise, global emissions must peak within the next decade and fall to at least 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, which would require emissions cuts of 3% annually after 2020. “A new degree of collective ambition and cooperation will be required before the world sees a climate agreement consistent with limited warming to even 2C let alone the 1.5C goal named by a growing number of governments and civil society groups,” said Elizabeth Sawin of Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont, referring to a push at Copenhagen by the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) and 48 developing nations for a deal that limits temperature rises to 1.5C. “The situation is serious. An increase of temperature of more than 1C above pre-industrial levels would result in the disappearance of our glaciers in the Andes, and the flooding of various islands and coastal zones,” said Bolivian foreign minister minister, David Choquehuanca, responding to the US study. Scientists are agreed that an overall rise of 2C in world temperatures would be serious for food production, species loss and freshwater supplies. But anything over 3C would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, they have said.
