How is climate change affecting Mexico?

As Mexico City’s chief resiliency officer, Arnoldo Kramer, said to The New York Times, “Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability to landslides — which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.”

Climate change is threatening to push a
crowded capital toward a breaking point.

And we’d argue the same is true for the rest of the nation – and the world. Climate change touches every aspect of our lives.

Here are three leading ways climate change is already hitting Mexico and its people. Plus, as a bonus, two ways you can take action today to help solve the climate crisis.

Read the Climate Reality Project story - “How is climate change affecting Mexico?”

Miles of ice collapsing into the sea.

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world. Flowing lines on these maps show how the ice is moving.

Ice sheets flow downhill, seemingly in slow motion. Mountains funnel the ice into glaciers. And ice flowing from the land into the sea can form a floating ice shelf.

Glaciers in certain areas have been undercut by warmer ocean waters, and the flow of ice is getting faster and faster.

The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.

Read the first part of a three-parr series in The New York Times - “Miles of ice collapsing into the sea.”

Governance stands between a decent life and climate driven catastrophe

Roger Cohen.

Governance at local, national and international levels focussing on the needs of people rather than their wants is all that stands between a decent life and climate change driven catastrophe.

And in reading Roger Cohen’s story in The New York Times - “Australia Does Anxiety” – it seems the neoliberalists of the world prefer chancing catastrophe rather than embracing the altruism that is the essence of a good life.

The resolution of climate change, well, it can’t be resolved in any time frame relevant to those alive today, but if worldwide we shift the emphasis from human wants to what people really need, we begin processes that will soften the extremes.

That change of emphasis hinges almost entirely on the governance of our society and in reading Cohen’s story we are well shy of having any governance to allow that shift in attitude – Robert McLean.

Australian lessons unfolding in Alberta

Alberta fires - too
big to control.

How do you stop a big, fast-moving wildfire like the one ravaging Fort McMurray, Alberta? The answer is, you can’t.

Don Whittemore, a senior disaster response manager from Boulder, Colo., who has trained teams of firefighters in the United States and abroad, compared the task to “trying to stop a hurricane from hitting the Eastern Seaboard.”

Wildfires are fought from the air and on the ground in a coordinated offensive meant to keep them from spreading. If the fire can be denied access to fresh terrain and fresh fuel, it will dwindle and burn itself out. But when strong, shifting winds are driving the flames, as in Alberta, the fire can move unpredictably and leap far beyond fire breaks and other obstacles like rivers and highways, making containment efforts futile and dangerous.

Read The New York Times story - “Forces of Nature Conspire Against Firefighters Around Fort McMurray.”

(Is this similar to Australia’s future? Bushfires we can’t stop, control and whose final conclusion rests with a burst of rain, a downpour that is in its affect the opposite of the hot, dry and windy conditions brought on by human-induced climate change, both, interestingly, are a product of climate change – Robert McLean.)

Alberta oil sands region is ablaze

Alberta fires consume three further communities.

Fast-moving wildfires spread farther across the Alberta oil sands region on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of three more communities south of Fort McMurray and the work camps north of the city. Thousands of people who fled the flames earlier in the week had to evacuate for the second time in three days.

The three communities — Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates and Fort McMurray First Nation — are about 30 miles south of Fort McMurray, indicating the scale and reach of the wildfire, which drove 88,000 people out of Fort McMurray this week, some of them to a shelter in Anzac. When the three communities were given the order overnight to clear out, frightened residents and evacuees boarded buses and packed up their cars for the slow exodus to Edmonton, the nearest big city.

Strong winds gusting up to 30 miles an hour made tackling the wall of flames risky on Thursday. The raging wildfire has already burned over 25,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,600 buildings in Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s oil sands region — a vast stretch of forested wilderness with the third-largest reserves of oil in the world.

Read The New York Times story - “Thousands More Flee Fast-Spreading Wildfire in Canada.”

NYT discusses the global warming pause misconception

The illustration from The New York Times.

Misconception: There was a global warming “pause,” so climate change is bunk.

Actually: That’s like saying a temporary dip in the stock market means that the best long-term investment strategy is keeping your cash under the mattress.

Those who deny the science of climate change and the role of human activity in causing it often claim that global warming paused for more than a decade until recently, and that the pause means that climate change is not happening.

Read The New York Times story - “Don’t Be Fooled by a Climate Change ‘Pause’.”

'Carbon price is key to climate change battle' - Age Editorial

In a letter to The New York Times this week, Australia's newly ensconced ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, attempted to refute claims in the newspaper's editorial of March 4 which, rightly, damned the CSIRO's decision to reduce its focus on climate change research. The New York Times called that decision a "deplorable misunderstanding of the importance of basic research into what is arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet".

In his written response, Mr Hockey said the CSIRO "is making a strong contribution to the growing body of international climate change knowledge", and he pointed to continuing research by other institutions, including the National Environmental Science Program and the Bureau of Meteorology.

His response was insipid and beside the point, reflecting the feeble policy approaches of the Abbott and Turnbull governments on climate change matters generally. Mr Hockey sidestepped the fundamental point behind criticism of Australia's funding of science and climate-change strategies, which is that instead of stepping up research and monitoring of climate change indicators and effects, the government is winding back.

Read the Editorial in today’s Melbourne Age - “Carbon price is key to climate change battle.”

'Australia Turns Its Back on Climate Science' - New York Times

For decades, Australia has run the most advanced and comprehensive atmosphere and ocean monitoring programs in the Southern Hemisphere, providing critical information not only for a nation that is already the driest on earth and fast getting drier, but also for a world in urgent need of such data to search for ways to cope with climate change.

Last month, to the dismay of climate scientists around the world, Australia’s federally financed science agency — the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO — announced plans to shift its focus to commercially viable projects and cut or reassign 350 researchers. The decision, as more than 3,000 climate scientists have declared in an open letter to the Australian government, demonstrates a deplorable misunderstanding of the importance of basic research into what is arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet.

Read The New York Times editorial - “Australia Turns Its Back on Climate Science.”

'We've blown it, but pessimism is not acceptable' - Naomi Oreskes

In 2000, Naomi Oreskes, a geologist by training, was working at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography in San Diego, an organization with a long history of climate change research.

“All the scientists around me spoke about climate change as if it were a settled matter. Proven scientifically. Manmade,” recalls Oreskes, a renowned Harvard professor specializing in the history of science. “Yet I noticed that in the media, the issue was reported as if there were a big debate over whether it was even real. That contrast led me to the work I published in 2004.”

Oreskes, whom The New York Times has called “one of the biggest names in climate science,” did what any interested party could have done then, but didn’t. She counted the scientific papers on climate change — 928 at the time — and determined that not one disagreed: all found that climate change was real, underway and manmade. She exploded the myth that any debate existed. The media took notice; and she, of course, came under attack from climate science deniers.

Read Justin Catanoso’s piece on Pulitzer Crisis Reporting - “Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change: We’ve Blown It… But Pessimism Is Not Acceptable.”

Esperance fires point to danagerous summer ahead: New York Times

A

ustralia — A fire that raged this week across hundreds of thousands of acres of grasslands and about-to-be harvested wheat crops, killing a farmer and three workers, points to a dangerous summer ahead in Australia, scientists and weather watchers say.

The deadly Esperance fires.

The fire, in the south of Western Australia, began last weekend after lightning struck about 12 miles north of the township of Esperance. It was flaring six days later after burning through 580 square miles of farmland, fanned by temperatures above 100 degrees and bursts of wind gusting at more than 50 miles an hour.

The combination of record heat and very dry conditions — October was the hottest month in Australia ever after its third-driest September — is prompting some officials to predict an especially intense fire season, which started early this year.

Read The New York Times story - “Record Heat Puts Australia at Risk of Intense Fire Season.”

British coal-fired power plants closed by 2025

T

he British government on Wednesday called for the closing of all coal-fired power plants in the country by 2025, and proposed that use of the plants be restricted two years before that.

The move, announced in advance of the United Nations conference on climate change set to open in Paris on Nov. 30, appeared aimed at showing Britain as a leader in reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

The push came as the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said in a report that the bloc would probably achieve its goal of reducing emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with levels that existed in 1990.

Read The New York Times story - “Britain Calls for Closing of Coal-Fired Power Plants by 2025.”

Nobel Prize winner sounds alarm on climate change

E

arly in his career, a scientist named Mario J. Molina was pulled into seemingly obscure research about strange chemicals being spewed into the atmosphere. Within a year, he had helped discover a global environmental emergency, work that would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize winner, Mario Molina - it's
totally unacceptable for
humanity not to act on climate change.

Now, at 70, Dr. Molina is trying to awaken the public to an even bigger risk. He spearheaded a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, which released a stark report Tuesday on global warming.

The report warns that the effects of human emissions of heat-trapping gases are already being felt, that the ultimate consequences could be dire, and that the window to do something about it is closing.

Read The New York Times story - “Scientists Sound Alarm on Climate.”

'Global warming is a fraud'- Vladimir Putin

R

ussian President Vladimir Putin believes global warming is a “fraud” — a plot to keep Russia from using its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and Putin critic, told The New York Times.

“That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general,” Belkovsky said.

Putin has been casting doubt on man-made global warming since the early 2000s, according to the Times. In 2003, Putin told an international climate conference that warming would allow Russians to “spend less on fur coats,” adding that “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”

Read Michael Bastasch’s story in the Cairns News - “Putin says global warming is a fraud”.

Teaching the truth about climate change

M

isinformation about climate change is distressingly common in the United States — a 2014 Yale study found that 35 percent of Americans believe that global warming is caused mostly by natural phenomena rather than human activity, and 34 percent think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is even happening. (In fact, an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is here and that it is caused by humans.)

One way to stop the spread of this misinformation is to teach children about climate change.

Read The New York Times story - “Teaching the Truth About Climate Change”.