Global Warming

Attorney Hounding Climate Scientists Funded By Coal Industry

August 27, 2015 Lee Fang, www.firstlook.org Educate! Climate Change, Global Warming, Science

By Lee Fang in The Intercept - Christopher Horner, an attorney who claims that the earth is cooling, is known within the scientific community for hounding climate change researchers with relentless investigations and public ridicule, often deriding scientists as “communists” and frauds. Horner is a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks and legal organizations over the last decade. He has called for investigations of climate scientists affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, and inundated climate researchers at major universities across the country with records requests that critics say are designed to distract them from their work.

Climate Commission Issues Blueprint For Low-Carbon Economy

July 8, 2015 Kitty Stapp, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Climate Change, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Global Warming

By Kitty Stapp in IPS News - Up to 96 percent of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 to keep global warming below a critical threshold of two degrees C could be achieved through a series of 10 steps, says a new report released by the Global Commission on the Economy and the Climate. “The low carbon economy is already emerging,” said former President of Mexico Felipe Calderón, Chair of the Commission. "Africa can ‘leapfrog’ the fossil-fuel based growth strategies of developed countries and become a leader in low-carbon development." -- Former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel “But governments, cities, businesses and investors need to work much more closely together and take advantage of recent developments if the opportunities are to be seized. We cannot let these opportunities slip through our fingers.”

Climate Change: UN Backs Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

March 17, 2015 Damian Carrington, www.theguardian.com Resist! Divesment, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Oil & Gas

The UN organisation in charge of global climate change negotiations is backing the fast-growing campaign persuading investors to sell off their fossil fuel assets. It said it was lending its “moral authority” to the divestment campaign because it shared the ambition to get a strong deal to tackle global warming at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December. “We support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of ‘burn what you like, when you like’ cannot continue,” said Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC). The move is likely to be controversial as the economies of many nations at the negotiating table heavily rely on coal, oil and gas.

Global Warming Has Been ‘Hugely Underestimated’

October 22, 2014 Dahr Jamail, www.truth-out.org Educate! Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Global Warming

A major study recently published in New Scientist found that "scientists may have hugely underestimated the extent of global warming because temperature readings from southern hemisphere seas were inaccurate," and said that ACD is "worse than we thought" because it is happening "faster than we realized." As has become predictable now, as evidence of increasing ACD continues to mount, denial and corporate exploitation are accelerating right along with it. Climate Disruption Dispatches The famed Northwest Passage is now being exploited by luxury cruise companies. Given the ongoing melting of the Arctic ice cap, a company recently announced a 900-mile, 32-day luxury cruise there, with fares starting at $20,000, so people can luxuriate while viewing the demise of the planetary ecosystem.

Zero Emissions Day September 21

September 3, 2014 ZeDay, www.zeroemissionsday.org Create! Climate Change, Global Warming, Organizing

On March 21, 2008, a Website calling for a "A Global Moratorium on Fossil Fuel Combustion on September 21" was launched from Sealevel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The message, "Giving our planet one day off a year", was simple yet profound. For true global reach the moratorium call was translated into 12 languages with assistance from Han Vermeulen and Anett C. Oelschlaegel at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany (Dutch, German, Russian), and Ramzi and Linda Kawar in Halifax (Arabic). The initial inspiration for this actually happened 20+ years earlier. One day Ken Wallace of Sealevel Special Projects, was strolling his new born daughter past a nasty idling truck parked – driverless – by the neighbourhood pizzeria. This truck in combination with the surrounding unrelenting traffic swirling by gave rise to a strange epiphany: "Stopping all this for a bit would be most excellent for our world altogether." How could one initiate such an event? In the 1980s Usenet was emerging as an early Internet discussion system and after a logistics meeting with friends, a carefully composed "message of great importance" was posted to Usenet through a computer at Dalhousie University. Not much came of it at the time, still the idea stuck and – with the emergence of Internet social networks in the new millennium – the notion of creating a global celebration that had potential for universal benefit seemed a real possibility.

The Last Gasp Of Climate Change Liberals

September 2, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Organize! Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Global Warming

The climate change march in New York on Sept. 21, expected to draw as many as 200,000 people, is one of the last gasps of conventional liberalism’s response to the climate crisis. It will take place two days before the actual gathering of world leaders in New York called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss the November 2015 U.N. Climate Conference in Paris. The marchers will dutifully follow the route laid down by the New York City police. They will leave Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street and Eighth Avenue, at 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday and conclude on 11th Avenue between West 34th and 38th streets. No one will reach the United Nations, which is located on the other side of Manhattan, on the East River beyond First Avenue—at least legally. There will be no speeches. There is no list of demands. It will be a climate-themed street fair. The march, because its demands are amorphous, can be joined by anyone. This is intentional. But as activist Anne Petermann has pointed out, this also means some of the groups backing the march are little more than corporate fronts. The Climate Group, for example, which endorses the march, includes among its members and sponsors BP, China Mobile, Dow Chemical Co., Duke Energy, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Greenstone. The Environmental Defense Fund, which says it “work[s] with companies rather than against them” and which is calling on its members to join the march, has funding from the oil and gas industry and supports fracking as a form of alternative energy. These faux environmental organizations are designed to neutralize resistance. And their presence exposes the march’s failure to adopt a meaningful agenda or pose a genuine threat to power.

The UN’s New Report On Global Warming Is The Most Terrifying Yet

August 28, 2014 John Light, www.billmoyers.com Educate! Climate Change, Global Warming, Policy, UN

The New York Times and Bloomberg News got a look at a draft of a new UN report on climate change. It’s bleak, to say the least. From the Times: Runaway growth on the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem, raising the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” over the coming decades, according to a draft of a major new United Nations report. Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked. Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes are also being felt around the world as a result of human emissions, the draft report said, and those problems are likely to intensify unless the gases are brought under control. The world may already be nearing a temperature at which the loss of the vast ice sheet covering Greenland would become inevitable, the report said. The actual melting would then take centuries, but it would be unstoppable and could result in a sea level rise of 23 feet, with additional increases from other sources like melting Antarctic ice, potentially flooding the world’s major cities.

Is Climate Policy Making Things Worse?

August 28, 2014 Bruce Melton, www.truth-out.org Educate! Climate Change, Global Warming, Policy

With This Decade's Climate Policy, Expect More Warming Than if Nothing Was Done at All. The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are discounted by the traditional long-term 100-year climate policy time frame? Our current policy has changed little from the dawning of the Kyoto Protocol era. This era dates back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and embodied the roots of current climate policy extending back to the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC) in 1988. Currently proposed (June 2014) EPA regulations on carbon dioxide emissions reductions are only 13 percent more stringent than Kyoto's goals and do not address short-lived climate pollutants or the short-term climate time frame. (1)

World’s Largest Ice Sheets Melting At Fastest Rate Ever Recorded

August 23, 2014 Jonathan Feldman, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Antarctica, Climate Change, Global Warming

Greenland and Antarctica are home to the two largest ice sheets in the world, and a new report released Wednesday says that they are contributing to sea level rise twice as much as they were just five years ago. Using the European Space Agency's CryoSat 2 satellite, the Alfred Wegener Institute from Germany has found that western Antarctica and Greenland are losing massive amounts of ice. "Combined, the two ice sheets are thinning at a rate of 500 cubic kilometres per year," said glaciologist Dr. Angelika Humbert, one of the authors of the AWI study, in a press release. "That is the highest speed observed since altimetry satellite records began about 20 years ago." The report, published in the online magazine The Cryosphere, says the CryoSat 2 satellite measured over 200 million elevation data points in Antarctica and 14.3 million in Greenland to track the loss of ice mass over the last several years. "When we compare the current data with those from the ICESat satellite from the year 2009, the volume loss in Greenland has doubled since then," said Humbert. "The loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has in the same time span increased by a factor of three."

The Age Of Climate Warfare Has Arrived

August 13, 2014 Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, www.uslaboragainstwar.org Educate! Climate Change, Global Warming, Wars and Militarism

During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week,President Barack Obama described climate change as a "creeping national security crisis" that will require the armed forces to "respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food." The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming. A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in thereport published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a "threat multiplier," but now - even worse - a "catalyst for conflict", the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades: ".... will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions - conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Must-See Video: Arctic Emergency

August 11, 2014 Donna Lisenby, www.ecowatch.com Educate! Arctic, Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming

This video provides the best explanation I have ever heard of how increasing carbon in the atmosphere changes the weather. It helped me understand the carbon-climate connection at an all new level. It also explains why the release of arctic methane is an important tipping point. For those of you who enjoy learning from the world’s top scientists about something that will change your life and the future of your children and grandchildren, this is an important video to watch. Please watch it and then share it with others. Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak On Melting Ice and Global Impacts (1080p HD). This film brings you the voices of climate scientists - in their own words. Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called "Earth's Air Conditioner". Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world - and the Arctic is central to these impacts.

Strengthen Rules To Avoid Climate Haymaker

July 30, 2014 Kevin Bundy, www.thehill.com Educate! Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming, Power Plants

Think of it as history’s biggest haymaker — after a decadeslong windup, sea-level rise is gearing up to clobber American coastal cities from Miami to D.C., as two recent scientific warnings make clear. First came the federal National Climate Assessment’s disturbing finding that global warming is already increasing dangers from floods and Hurricane Sandy-style storm surges. Then came two studies showing that huge Antarctica glacier clusters have started a long-term collapse that could cause far greater sea-level increases. So why isn’t President Obama proposing a more serious solution to the greenhouse gas emissions from our nation’s power plants — the largest source of the pollutants disrupting our climate and paving the way for rising oceans to redraw America’s coastlines? The president’s Clean Power Plan, which is the focus of public hearings in four cities around the country this month, has generated tremendous hype and confusion. But the bottom line is simple: These rules just don’t do enough to cut planet-warming pollution from existing power plants.

Small Islands Facing Climate Change Are Beacons

June 8, 2014 Stephen Leahy, www.ipsnews.net Create! Caribbean, Climate Change, Global Warming, Solar

Facing potential extinction under rising sea levels, many small island nations are embracing renewable energy and trying to green their economies. Although the least responsible for carbon emissions, small countries like Barbados are on the front lines of climate impacts. “Small island nations’ voices have to be heard by the rest of the world,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “Many will undergo fundamental changes. Some will lose 60 to 70 percent of their beaches and much of their tourism infrastructure. Climate change will destroy some countries and the livelihoods of millions of people,” Steiner told IPS in Bridgetown. Up to 100 percent of coral reefs in some areas of the Caribbean sea have been affected by bleaching due to too-hot seawater linked to global warming. Without global action to reduce emissions there may not be any healthy reefs left in the entire Caribbean region by 2050, according to UNEP’s Small Island Developing States Foresight Report. Released in Bridgetown on World Environment Day Jun. 5, the report calculates that island nations in the Caribbean face187 billion dollars in shoreline damage from sea level rise well before the end of this century.

Obama Plan Doesn’t Cut Carbon Quickly Enough

June 3, 2014 Patrick Sullivan, www.biologicaldiversity.org Educate! Barack Obama, Climate Change, Global Warming

New rules unveiled today by President Barack Obama don’t do enough to cut planet-warming pollution from America’s power plants. Using the Clean Air Act, the president aims to reduce existing power plant emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels (or about 7.7 percent below 1990 levels, the base year for the international climate treaty) by 2030. But international scientists warned years ago that developed countries like the United States must reduce their emissions 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid tipping the scales further toward a climate catastrophe. “This is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose — we’re glad the president has finally turned the water on, but it’s just not enough to get the job done,” said Kevin Bundy of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “President Obama’s draft power plant plan should be strengthened to achieve the global pollution cuts scientists recommend. He also has to quit stalling on reducing emissions from other sectors such as air travel and the oil and gas industry. If we keep kicking the can down the road, the cost and difficulty of averting catastrophe will skyrocket.”

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