Global Thermostat can fight climate change. Interview with Graciela Chichilnisky

Global Thermostat was founded in 2010 by Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger. Chichilnisky has been called an “A List Star Economist” by the Washington Post and a “Hero of the Environment” by Time Magazine; she is an economist and a mathematician. Professor at Columbia University, Chichilnisky has worked for many years with the United Nations where she was the US Lead Author of the IPCC (Working Group III) who was given the Nobel Prize for its work on Climate Change and is the designer and the author of the Carbon Market of the UN Kyoto Protocol.

Graciela Chichilnisky who started 'Global Thermostat' with Peter Eisenberger.

Peter Eisenberger is a famous material physicist who headed global R&D for EXXON  where he led the introduction of solar energy technology. Eisenberger was professor of physics and the founder of the Materials Institute at Princeton University, he founded the Earth Institute and was Vice Provost and is professor at Columbia University.

Read the Impakter story Alessandro Du Du Besse - “Global Thermostat can fight climate change. Interview with Graciela Chichilnisky.”

Trump populist groudswell must be checked to advoid climate change

by Robert McLean

The populist groundswell that has handed Donald Trump Republican presidential candidacy in the November U.S. election is what needs to be checked if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided.

Donald Trump - the Washington Post says
he is a danger to America and the world.

The real estate billionaire (claimed, as no-one has as yet seen his tax returns) appeals to base emotions and although his apparent wealth comes from being shoulder-deep in the neoliberal establishment, he portrays himself as a simple soul, absolutely in touch with those from a wholly different socio-economic stratum.

It is the likes of Donald Trump who must be addressed if the world is to stand any chance of avoiding the worst of climate change.

Trump is a climate denialist and so as you know where he stands, it becomes a little easier to deal with him.

However, he is becoming a powerful and influential fellow with legions of loyal followers and so “dealing with him” is becoming increasingly difficult.

Climate change is a wicked problem for which there is no simplistic answer, but Trump has prized open his popularity with promises of simple solutions to everything, appealing to Americans feeling downtrodden by, confusingly, the very processes that have made Trump rich.

Countering climate change is not going to be easy, but Trump in his “I love you” approach has not for a moment allowed his supporters any sense of challenge or difficulty in “making America great again”.

His promise of making America great again means a strengthening of or a return to the America that was until recently the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases. It’s now second only to China and with Trump in charge, the U.S. would be back at the top of the list.

There is more to Trump than his disregard for matters about which the world’s climate scientists concern themselves, although that is obviously the most critical, for the “might is right” view is a part of his platform and as the Washington Post says in an editorial he is a danger to both America and the world.

Read the Melbourne Age story -“Washington Post editorial: Donald Trump 'a danger to the nation and the world'.”

Food delivery device invades our footpaths

The "suitcase" meets a pedestrian
 - it's programmed to give way.

Pedestrians often complain that there is no room on the sidewalks (and in New York City, people are taking to the streets because of it), and it’s because the cars stole all the space and everyone else is fighting over scraps. And while we worry about how pedestrians will deal with autonomous vehicles on the roads, now they will also have to worry about autonomous delivery vehicles on the sidewalks.

Vehicles like the new Starship, designed in Estonia, tested in London and soon coming to Washington DC. CEO Allan Martinson describes it in the Washington Post:

“It’s basically a mobile phone on wheels,” Martinson said. Its low speed and weight — 4 miles per hour and 40-pounds max — also short-circuit safety concerns, he added. “It’s basically a rolling suitcase. If you go home and try to kill yourself with a suitcase, you’d have to be very inventive.”

Read the Treehugger story - “Will autonomous delivery robots soon be pushing pedestrians off the sidewalks?”

Catastrophic changes justy decades away - James Hansen

The great aspiration of the Paris climate accord is to keep global warming from exceeding two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But according to a new paper, even two degrees of warming would mean the disintegration of large sections of the polar ice sheets, boulder-spewing storms stronger than any since prehistory, and the drowning of most coastal cities by the end of the century.

“We’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control,” the paper’s author, retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen, told the New York Times on Tuesday.

Using computer models, evidence from ancient episodes of climate change, and modern observations, Hansen and his team arrived at one essential conclusion: The melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets will set off a vicious cycle that dramatically accelerates the pace of climate change. The key concept here is ocean “stratification,” a process by which cold, fresh meltwater rises to the ocean surface while warmer salt water is pushed beneath. (The Washington Post notes that an “anomalously cold ‘blob’ of ocean water” has been detected off the southern coast of Greenland.) That warmer salt water would eventually reach the base of the ice sheets, melting them from below, thus spurring more stratification, which would then spur more melting, which would then spur more stratification, which would spur more warming, until our grandchildren are all swallowed by the sea.

Read the New York Times Magazine story - ”New Paper Suggests Catastrophic Climate Shifts May Be Decades Away.”

Pope sets the stage and others ponder whether or not they should walk on

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s translated bits of the draft of a major Vatican document on the environment seeped out Wednesday, figures from the Dalai Lama to presidential hopeful Jeb Bush were already debating whether and how to follow the pope’s call for humans to reframe their relationship with “our sister, Mother Earth.’ ”

Politicians, environmental activists and theologians across the spectrum were busy highlighting various aspects of the draft, which was leaked Monday to the anger of the Vatican. The official version of the document, called an encyclical, was to be made public 6 a.m. ET Thursday. The Vatican said that the draft was inaccurate in places.

Some environmentalists were thrilled by the draft’s dramatic framing of climate change as the moral issue of the day, one that reflects a human race blinded by consumerism and individualism, a Northern Hemisphere divorced from its other, needier half.

Read Michelle Boorstein and Chris Mooney’s Washington Post story - “On the eve of its release, Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change is already stirringcontroversy”.

World weather stuck on 'strange' - Washington Post

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ven for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange, the Washington Post reports.

Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding. A heat wave that has killed more than 1,800 people in India. Record 91-degree readings in Alaska, of all places. A pair of top-of-the-scale typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the East.

“Mother Nature keeps throwing us crazy stuff,” Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis says. “It’s just been one thing after another.”

Jerry Meehl, an extreme-weather expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that May is usually a pretty extreme month, with lots of tornadoes and downpours. Even so, he says, this has been “kind of unusually intense.”

Read the Washington Post story - “This has been a month of extreme weather around the world”.

Food bowl feels the effects of climate induced water shortages

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alifornia is known as one of the food bowls of the world.

However, life for primary producers (well, in fact everyone) in the American state is becoming increasingly difficult as the realities of climate change have altered all that is normal.

“California is faced with a double whammy of high temperatures — the state just had its warmest winter on record — and low rainfall that is exacerbated by an atmospheric pattern that for three years straight has diverted winter storms away from the state, depriving it of crucial precipitation. The outlook, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not decreased, is a megadrought lasting 30 years for California and several Southwestern states, a NASA study said.” The Washington Post writes.

The story - “As water runs dry, Californians brace for a new way of life” – says a divide has been created by targeting urban residents but not farmers, who use 80 percent of the state’s water and grow crops such as rice and almonds that require prodigious amounts of water.

We have destabilized 'the great ice sheet' and now there's more

The great ice sheet of West Antarctica may have been irreversibly destabilized by humans, setting in motion a more than 10 feet of sea level rise.

We realized in 2014 and now 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again.

The Washington Post says, “Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity.”

The Post’s story - “The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse.” – discusses just how badly we are messing up the planet.

Disappointment, validity and credibility



Bjorn Lomborg.

Disappointment envelops me when I see major newspapers with international credibility publishing stories of questionable validity.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post recently published an opinion piece from Bjørn Lomborg, who is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School where he directs the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

Lomborg, the author “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, “Cool It” and “How much have global problems cost the world? A scorecard from 1900 to 2050” had his views published in the Washington Post in in story headed; “Don’t blame climate change for extreme weather”.

Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist” had been discredited by many influential climatologists and the publication of his article drew this comment from one reader:

“I might have taken this article seriously had it been written by a research climatologist with peer-reviewed publications in climatology. I am offended, though, that the WP accepted this piece for publication, knowing full well that the author could only claim a pretense of actual knowledge (adjunct professor of business). It would have been equally meaningful for a writer to step outside the WP building and ask passers-by on the street what they think about climate change and then publish their comments as though they were scientific results. Bad journalism here and appalling editorial work”.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch who, along with his cohort of editors, is known as a climate skeptic and the Washington Post was only recently bought by amazon.com owner, Jeff Bezos.

The scientist agee, so why doesn't everyone else?

The Washington Post asks: “Scientists agree on climate change. So why doesn’t everyone else?”

The story says: “Here’s a finding that shouldn’t be all that surprising: Since 1991, roughly 97 percent of all published scientific papers that take a position on the question agree that humans are warming the planet.”

That statistic comes from and extensive new survey by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli, who run the Australian Skeptical Science website.

Cook and Nuccitelli’s findings build on earlier studies that found the exact same thing.