Giant Greta Thunberg mural to watch over San Francisco's downtown

San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its eco-consciousness, will soon have a giant likeness of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg gazing upon its downtown, reminding residents to respect the planet.

A mural on the side of a building depicts the
Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg.

The Argentine muralist Andres Iglesias, who signs his art with the pseudonym Cobre, is expected to complete the project in the central Union Square neighborhood by next week, SFGate reported. Cobre also painted a revered mural of the comedian Robin Williams that has since been demolished.

“Climate change is real,” Cobre told SFGate. “This girl Greta is awesome and she knows what she’s doing. I hope with this mural people will realize we have to take care of the world.”

The environmental not-for-profit group One Atmosphere reportedly reached out to Cobre after the mural of Williams was slated to come down and just as Cobre was searching for a building for his next project. The organization is said to be supplying all the paint for the project.

Read the story from The Guardian by Mario Koran - “Giant Greta Thunberg mural to watch over San Francisco's downtown.” 

Kincade Fire: The Age of Flames Is Consuming California

Right on cue, Northern California has plunged back into wildfire hell. This time two years ago, the Tubbs Fire was ripping through Santa Rosa and other communities north of San Francisco, killing 22 and destroying 5,000 homes. And last year on November 8, the Camp Fire virtually obliterated the town of Paradise, killing 86 and burning an astonishing 20,000 structures to the ground.

The Age of Flames - northern California plunged back into wildfire hell.

Last night at 9:30 pm PT, a wildfire sparked northeast of Healdsburg, a town of over 10,000 just north of San Francisco. Fanned by winds of up to 80 mph, the Kincade Fire tore through the landscape, consuming 16,000 acres in a matter of hours. Thousands have been forced to flee, and it’s barely contained. Early footage of people driving through the area shows the damage is likely extensive, with homes burning along the roadside—the number of structures reported destroyed so far is 49.

Welcome to what fire historian Steve Pyne calls the Pyrocene, a unique time in history when human use of fire, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, and the attendant climate change combine to create hell on Earth. “We are creating a fire age that will be equivalent to the Ice Age,” he says. The reckoning is here, and California—a highly flammable state packed with people—is getting it worse than just about anybody in the world.

Read the story from Wired by Matt Simon - “Kincade Fire: The Age of Flames Is Consuming California.”

How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change

When San Francisco broke heat records in 2017, with 106-degree temperatures in September, psychiatrist Robin Cooper didn’t hear until after the fact that one of her patients had been feeling dizzy and feverish. One day, he’d fainted in his poorly ventilated workspace. Emergency room doctors had surmised he’d had a virus. But Cooper warned him it could actually be a drug she’d prescribed him interacting with the extreme heat. Certain antipsychotic medications, often used in treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can impair the body’s ability to cool itself. This is one reason hospitalization rates among schizophrenic patients can spike with the temperature. “I told him, you need to know these medications put you at risk during heat waves,” Cooper says. “He now is armed with that knowledge the next time around.”

“Historians will say that groups of people have faced
very difficult, tumultuous times,” says one psychiatrist.
“But human beings have never faced this before.” 

With temperatures rising globally, there will be increasingly frequent “next times.” The potential danger of heat-drug interactions is just one reason concern is growing about the impact of climate change on mental health. The fourth federally mandated National Climate Assessment, released in late 2018, lists mental health consequences and stress among the outcomes driven by increased temperatures, extreme weather and sea-level rise. “The last two years, the conversation has shifted toward climate change,” says Reggie Ferreira, editor of the journal Traumatology and director of Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. “We see disaster causing trauma, but climate change is intensifying the disaster. We need to focus on what’s intensifying these disasters and get people prepared.”

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Andrea Marks - “How the Mental Health Community Is Bracing for the Impact of Climate Change.”

My generation won’t be able to fly other than for emergencies

Facebook post by Greta Thunberg - 

Greta Thunberg.

“After the COP24 I have been invited to speak in places like Panama, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Vancouver, British Virgin Islands… But sadly our remaining carbon budget will not allow any such travels.

My generation won’t be able to fly other than for emergencies in a foreseeable future, if we are to be the least bit serious about the 1.5 degree warming limit. Why? Because adult generations in countries like mine have used up our resources.

I will try to make it to as many places as possible without flying. And also participate via video link. Also tag your climate actions with me, so we can show the world what actions are going on for climate change.

And of course stop flying and go vegan alone is not the solution.

We have to aim for a zero carbon lifestyle as soon as possible. Political decisions are necessary. But as they do not exist yet we have to do what we can ourselves to make the political movement come alive.“

Read the story from the Centre for Climate Safety - “My generation won’t be able to fly other than for emergencies”.

When These California Wildfires Go Out, New Ones Will Come

“Paradise is gone,” resident Sue Brown told the Los Angeles Times after witnessing the devastation from the Camp fire, which is now the largest fire in California history. Brown said she and her husband had planned to spend the rest of their lives in Paradise, a city of about 27,000 in the Sierra Nevada foothills about two hours north of San Francisco. But now the entire town is in ashes. The Camp fire has burned more than 110,000 acres and consumed 6,713 structures. Twenty-nine people have died. And it’s still burning. Southern California is also ablaze. In the hills around Malibu, the Woolsey fire has consumed 83,000 acres and forced more than a quarter-million people to evacuate.

A tattered American flag flies over a burned out
home at the Camp Fire, in Paradise, Calif., Nov 11, 2018.

I remember Paradise. I have driven through it while visiting family, who live just north of the town, or on my way to a cabin we used to have in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I remember Paradise because the name always struck me as so hopeful, even if the town, itself, seemed ordinary, with modest ranch houses set among scattered oak trees and pines. People have ATVs in the garage and horses on a few acres of land out back. On clear days, you can see the outline of the Sierra Nevada mountains on the horizon. This is not elite treehugger California; Butte County, which includes Paradise, was a Trump stronghold in the 2016 election.

Read the story from Rolling Stone magazine by Jeff Goodell - “When These California Wildfires Go Out, New Ones Will Come.”

Around the halls: Climate experts explain what to watch at this week’s Global Climate Action Summit

Ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this week (September 12-14), Brookings experts weigh in on the local, national, and international contexts, as well as the key issues at stake.

Around the halls and the Global Climate Action Summit.

Read the Brookings story - “Around the halls: Climate experts explain what to watch at this week’s Global Climate Action Summit.”

Building a post-carbon future: California tries to lead — will the world follow?

Last July, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced a “Climate Action Summit” meeting in San Francisco in September 2018, with the direct goal of supporting the Paris climate agreement recently abandoned by President Trump. “No nation or state is doing what they should be doing,” Brown said at the time. “You can’t do too much to sound the alarm because so far the response is not adequate to the challenge.”

California aims for a post-carbon future - will the world follow?

California’s own record  during Brown's tenure is muddled, as I’ve previously noted, but the state could start to change that, according to a new report called “The Sky’s Limit California,” from Oil Change International in collaboration with a broad coalition of environmental justice and consumer groups. California can do this by matching its existing policies to reduce fossil fuel consumption with new policies for “a managed decline of oil extraction” — an approach described in a recent paper as “cutting with both arms of the scissors” — and by providing for a "just transition" for workers and communities who would otherwise suffer, a major moral and political challenge that’s been neglected far too long. 

Read the Saloon story by Paul Rosenberg - “Building a post-carbon future: California tries to lead — will the world follow?”

Hurricane Harvey opens dialogue on climate change in San Francisco.

Harvey has dumped nearly 25 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana.

Piled on top of the entire city of San Francisco, that water would be more than 2,000 feet tall -- nearly twice the size of Sales Force Tower.

Harvey has dumped nearly 25 trillion 

gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana.

Many hope Harvey will motivate action to combat climate change.

Watch the video in the player above to hear what Congresswoman Jackie Speier had to say on the topic.

Read the ABC7 News story - “Hurricane Harvey opens dialogue on climate change in San Francisco."

Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present

A few years ago, a locally famous blogger in San Francisco, known as Burrito Justice, created an exquisitely disorienting map, with help from a cartographer named Brian Stokle, and started selling copies of it online. The map imagined the city in the year 2072, after 60 years of rapid sea-level rise totaling 200 feet. At present, San Francisco is a roughly square-shaped, peninsular city. But on the map, it is severed clean from the mainland and shaved into a long, fat smudge. The shape of the land resembles a sea bird diving underwater for prey, with odd bays chewing into the coastlines and, farther out, a sprawl of bulging and wispy islands that used to be hills. If you lived in San Francisco, it was a map of where you already were and, simultaneously, where you worried you might be heading. “The San Francisco Archipelago,” Burrito Justice called it — a formerly coherent city in shards.

The map wasn’t science; it didn’t even pretend to be. I want to be very clear about that, because I worry it’s reckless to inject any more false facts into a conversation about climate change. Projecting the effect of sea-level rise on a specific location typically involves recondite computer models and calculations; Burrito Justice was just a fascinated hobbyist, futzing around on his laptop in his backyard. His entire premise was unscientific; for now, it is unthinkable that seas will rise so high so quickly. Even as most credible scientific estimates keep increasing and the poles melt faster than imagined, those estimates currently reach only between six and eight feet by the year 2100. That’s still potentially cataclysmic: Water would push into numerous cities, like Shanghai, London and New York, and displace hundreds of millions of people. And yes, there are some fringe, perfect-storm thought experiments out there that can get you close to 200 feet by the end of the century. But in truth, Burrito Justice settled on that number only because that’s how high he needed to jack up the world’s oceans if he wanted to wash out a particular road near his house. He has a friendly rivalry with another blogger, who lives in an adjacent neighborhood known for being a cloistered hamlet, and Burrito Justice thought it would be funny to see it literally become an island. So again: The map wasn’t science. It didn’t pretend to be. The point, initially, was just to needle this other guy named Todd.

Read The New York Times story - “Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present.”

California is burning!

An air tanker drops fire retardant at a
 containment line northeast of Lower Lake, California. 

California is burning.

The state has nine active wildfires as large as 10 hectares or more, including the massive Clayton fire north of San Francisco that forced nearly 1500 residents to flee their homes after it erupted Saturday in dry conditions created by the state's extreme drought. On Sunday the blaze doubled in size.

"The winds really kicked up, and the fire crossed over tentative lines in place [to slow its advance] and started impacting a whole new area," Suzie Blankenship, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said Monday. "Once it creates that momentum, it really moves. They had a good handle on it. We had this fire contained at 5 per cent Saturday. But today it's still 5 per cent. It tells you that the fire keeps moving and moving and moving in different directions."

Cal Fire, as the department is known, reported Monday that more than 3800 fires have scorched over 45,000 ha of state land since January. That's 20 per cent more fires than at this point last year, and well above the state's five-year average of 3200 fires and 85,900 acres for the same time span.

Read the story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Wildfires north of San Francisco threaten California, force 1500 to evacuate.”

San Francisco bans plactic water bottle in pollution control bid

In a bold move toward pollution control, San Francisco has just become the first city in America to ban the sale of plastic water bottles, a move that is building on a global movement to reduce the huge amount of waste from the billion-dollar plastic bottle industry.

Over the next four years, the ban will phase out the sales of plastic water bottles that hold 21 ounces or less in public places. Waivers are permissible if an adequate alternative water source is not available.

Read the Global Flare story - “San Francisco Becomes The First City to Ban Sale of Plastic Bottles.”