These Young Climate Justice Advocates Say It's Time for a Revolution

Jamie Margolin can’t remember a time in her life when climate change wasn’t a crisis. The signs were everywhere, from the disappearing sea life in the 16-year-old’s hometown of Seattle to the climate-related disasters in Colombia where her mother’s family lives.

Jamie Margolin of Seattle, Washington, left, is an
environmental activist who co-founded Zero
Hour with Nadia Nazar of Baltimore, Maryland,
right. With a team of volunteers, they are preparing
 for the first Youth Climate March in Washington, D.C.

“When you’re growing up with all this beautiful wildlife around you, it gives you a better idea of what you want to protect,” said Margolin, who will start 11th grade this fall. “And also it’s more painful when, for example, things go wrong, when you see that that habitat is being destroyed.”

Margolin said she wanted to take action when she was younger, but avoided it because the problem was so terrifying. But Donald Trump’s election spurred her to action.

“As young people, we find ourselves in this really awkward place in history where we are going to be alive for the worst effects of climate change, but we’re not old enough to make the decisions right at that tipping point where they need to be made,” she said.  

Read the HuffPost story by Yvette Cabrera -  “These Young Climate Justice Advocates Say It's Time for a Revolution.”

Seattle Becomes The First Major American City To Ban Plastic Straws And Utensils

In a first-of-its-kind law for any major American city, Seattle has instituted a ban on plastic straws and utensils at all food service businesses.

Many plastic straws are too small and flimsy to
 be processed by recyclers and so end up in the ocean.

Upon request only, those vendors may provide people with a compostable straw or utensil.

Since 2008, Seattle has been rolling out a citywide ban on single-use plastics and removed exemptions from the list of prohibited items each year. Since there are now “multiple manufacturers of approved compostable utensils and straws,” those items’ plastic counterparts will no longer get a pass, the city said in its notice.

Read the Huffington Post story by Lydia O’Connor - “Seattle Becomes The First Major American City To Ban Plastic Straws And Utensils.”

90 Companies Helped Cause the Climate Crisis—They Should Pay for It

Pacific Northwest forests are on fire. Several blazes are out of control, threatening rural towns, jumping rivers and highways, and covering Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and other cities in smoke and falling ash. Temperatures this summer are an average of 3.6 degrees higher than the last half of the 20th century, according to the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group analysis published in The Seattle Times.

Firefighters attempt to save the Casa Loma fire
 station in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Loma
Prieta, California on September 27, 2016.

Fire crews have been battling fires for months. In spite of all the effort, though, officials expect the fires to continue burning until major rains come sometime this fall. Meanwhile, firefighting coffers are running dry as costs run into the hundreds of millions.

Read the Yes! magazine story by Sarah Van Gelder - “90 Companies Helped Cause the Climate Crisis—They Should Pay for It.”

Why Death Valley and the Pacific Northwest are so hot right now

The West Coast is burning up. Death Valley’s average temperature in July –107.4 degrees Fahrenheit — was the hottest on record, and cities like Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Palm Springs and Phoenix have reached record scorching temps over the past few weeks, too. Meanwhile, wildfires are raging north of the border in British Columbia and Cascade Mountains.

Twenty Mule Team Canyon in Death Valley, California. 

Climate change might be tipping records. “A few of our temperature records would not have been broken with this heat wave,” Philip Mote, a climate scientist at Oregon State University, said. “If you took this specific meteorological condition and then dialed back the greenhouse gases to what they were 50 years ago, it would be a little bit cooler. Portland instead of being 103 yesterday might’ve only been 101.” Weather experts shared the sentiment that climate change’s contribution to an event like this “might be a degree or two.”

Without global warming, there would still be a heat wave, just probably not a record-setting one.

Read the PBS Newshour story by Roni  Dengler - “Why Death Valley and the Pacific Northwest are so hot right now.”

Pacific Northwest threatened by hottest weather ever recorded; Seattle could hit 100

An overpowering dome of hot air has entrenched itself over the Pacific Northwest and is primed to cook population centers like Seattle and Portland in record-crushing heat through Friday.

European model simulation of heat
dome over Pacific Northwest Thursday.

Excessive heat warnings blanket the western third of Northern California, Oregon and Washington state. High temperatures just inland from coastal locations are forecast to soar to between 100 and 110 degrees.

“We are talking about one of the major sustained heat waves in a long time around here,” writes Cliff Mass, professor of meteorology at the University of Washington. He said that “there is a lot of confidence” temperatures will at least reach the mid-90s in Seattle and notes the GFS model projects a high of 100 on Thursday — a reading he can’t “remember ever seeing”.

Read the story by Jason Samenow in The Washington Post - “Pacific Northwest threatened by hottest weather ever recorded; Seattle could hit 100.”