Climate change is not only destroying the planet, but our psyches as wel

Climate change is killing the planet your therapist lives on too!

Check out ‘First dog on the moon” from The Guardian -  “Climate change is not only destroying the planet, but our psyches as well.”

Humans blazing similar path to cause of ancient mass extinction

Washington: Scientists think they've figured out the falling dominoes that led to Earth's largest mass extinction and worry that human-caused climate change puts the planet on a vaguely similar path.

An artist's image of savannasaur dinosaurs.CREDIT:

Some 250 million years ago, about 90 per cent of sea life and 70 per cent of land life went extinct in what is now called the Great Dying. Scientists have long speculated that massive volcanic outbursts triggered the cataclysmic event, but how that worked was still a bit fuzzy. It wasn't the lava itself.

A new study in Thursday's journal Science used complex computer simulations to plot out what happened after the volcanoes blew: It led to ocean temperatures rising by about 11 degrees, which then starved the seawater of oxygen.

That hot oxygen-starved water caused the mass marine die-off, especially farther from the equator.

Read the story from The Age by Seth Borenstein - “Humans blazing similar path to cause of ancient mass extinction.”

‘We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention

"We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”

Dr Mayer Hillman with his bike outside his home in London.

Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.

Read the Patrick Barkham story from The Guardian - “‘We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention.”

Shipping’s Heavy Fuel Oil Puts the Arctic at Risk. Could It Be Banned?

Heavy fuel oil—the molasses-like sludge left after the oil refining process—is among the dirtiest fuels on the planet, and yet its use by ships is widespread in the Arctic, a pristine environment where it could do significant harm.

The majority of the Arctic's black carbon, a short-lived climate
pollutant, comes from heavy fuel oil used in ships.

Burning the fuel contributes to climate change, and a spill in Arctic waters would be a nightmare for emergency response coordinators. But it's cheap, and attractive for ships making long hauls, the kind of traffic on the rise as climate change makes Arctic shipping easier.

Concerns about the safety and use of the fuel in a delicate and remote environment led to it being banned in the Antarctic in 2011, but efforts to include the Arctic in that ban fell short.

Read the Inside Climate News story by Sabrina Shankman - “Shipping’s Heavy Fuel Oil Puts the Arctic at Risk. Could It Be Banned?”

Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law

A woman sees a child fall down a well, so she climbs a fence onto private property to save the child’s life. In the unlikely event that the woman were charged with criminal trespassing, her attorney would use a choice-of-evils defense, also known as a necessity defense, to get her acquitted. He would argue that the child faced an immediate physical threat, and that it was necessary for his client to break the law in order to prevent the child from dying. But what if the threat were something less discrete than a well—the air, the water, the very ground beneath our feet? What if it imperilled every child in a neighborhood, or on the planet? Would the necessity defense still hold?

A group of pipeline protesters in Boston’s
West Roxbury neighborhood gave new life
to an old legal strategy.

Last week, in a Boston municipal courthouse, thirteen defendants brought that question before Judge Mary Ann Driscoll. They had been arrested, in 2016, while protesting the construction of a high-pressure natural-gas pipeline in the neighborhood of West Roxbury, and claimed that their acts of civil disobedience—trespassing, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest—were necessary to forestall both local and global threats. In their testimony to Driscoll, some of the defendants focussed on community safety. The pipeline route, they noted, went through densely populated streets, past an active quarry where bedrock is regularly blasted. According to calculations made for comparable pipelines, an explosion could incinerate an area of at least thirty city blocks. Others discussed rising greenhouse-gas emissions and the harm that climate change is inflicting on people around the world. Driscoll listened to the defendants silently and, after the last one testified, announced that she found them not guilty—that their actions were justified by reason of necessity. She acquitted them without so much as an administrative fee.

Read Carolyn Kormann’s story from The New Yorker - “Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law.”

We Are Drowning In Plastic, and Fracking Companies Are Profiting

We are choking the planet in plastic. Everything from wasteful water bottles to grocery shopping bags are polluting our waterways, and endangering marine life and the natural environment. It’s fair to say that even the most casual news consumer has probably encountered a Facebook post, TV report, or radio segment about the garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean. 

Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the
 Thames Estuary on January 2, 2018 in Cliffe, Kent.

But what’s less well-known is what is fueling this plastics binge: fracking. As the Guardian recently reported, in less than a decade, tens of billions of dollars have been invested in creating new manufacturing sites around the world to turn fossil fuels into resin pellets used to manufacture plastic products. The companies profiting off this surge in plastics are contributing to a growing climate crisis while generating mountains of plastic garbage.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Wenonah Hauter - “We Are Drowning In Plastic, and Fracking Companies Are Profiting.”

How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth

According to the Ecological Footprint Network,
 humans currently consume at a rate 1.7 times
what Earth’s generative capacity can sustain—and
the gap is growing.

To have a viable human future on this overstressed planet, it is essential that we build a solidarity economy that seeks material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all in balance with a living Earth. We must join in common cause to build local relationships of caring and equitable sharing across the lines of race, religion, and class. Strong and healthy local relationships, however, are only one element of the larger economic transformation required to rebalance our relationship to Earth and achieve a radical redistribution of access to and control of the essentials of living.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by David Korten - “How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth.”

How to Help My Daughter Face Climate Change With an Open Heart

When the wildfires were still raging in California, my 12-year-old daughter and I rode Amtrak north from Oakland to Sacramento. Nearing Berkeley, we caught our first glimpse of the gray-brown wall of smoke issuing in from Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties. After riding 10 or so miles further on, the illusion of the wall suddenly dissipated, and we found ourselves speeding along in a fog of fine ash, our train blanketed in its opaque haze.

Gazing into the smoke, my daughter seated beside me, I considered the stark difference our awareness of global warming created between my childhood and hers. And I felt a deep anxiety stir in my belly.

What happens to a child’s psyche, I asked myself, as she gradually absorbs the knowledge that our planet is warming at a terrifying rate and to an unimaginably dangerous degree, then quietly observes the adults in her life, particularly those most responsible for caring for and protecting her, doing the very things that are causing the emergency? What happens as she observes the mundane spectrum of everyday life in the United States amid climate chaos: as dad pulls the car up to the pump, as mom comes home from the airport after a business trip, as the family sits down to another meat and factory farm-based dinner, iPhones at the ready and the thermostat cranked to 70?

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Chris Moore-Backman - “How to Help My Daughter Face Climate Change With an Open Heart.”

Climate Change already Damaging Health of Millions

The findings, outlined in The Lancet medical journal, demonstrate the various ways climate change is already affecting the health of people across the planet.

The report highlights the urgent
need to cut greenhouse gas
 emissions

Leading doctors, academics and policy professionals from 24 organisations – including the University of Exeter – worked on the report.

“Human health is vulnerable to climate change and associated changes in air quality,” said Professor Peter Cox, from the University of Exeter.

“This vulnerability is exacerbated by economic inequalities and ageing populations.

“Action to halt climate change is a huge opportunity to improve human health and wellbeing.”

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - “Climate Change already Damaging Health of Millions.”

There’s Only One Way to Avoid Climate Catastrophe: ‘De-growing’ our Economy

You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness. The images we see in the media are almost too violent to comprehend. And these are the storms that made the news; many others did not. Monsoon flooding in India, Bangladesh and Nepal killed 1,200 people and left millions homeless, but Western media paid little attention: it’s too much suffering to take in at once.

What’s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it’s only going to get worse. A recent paper in the journal Nature estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It’s more likely that we’re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees. If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there’s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.

Read the Resilience story - “There’s Only One Way to Avoid Climate Catastrophe: ‘De-growing’ our Economy.”

A group of prominent scientists says we have three years to save the planet from irreversible destruction

Leanna Garfield.

A planet devastated by climate change may seem like a distant future. But Earth is already experiencing effects today.

Globally, the mean rate of sea level rise increased 50% in the last two decades. In 2017, temperatures have already reached their highest levels in history in some areas, from California to Vietnam. And the past three years were the hottest on record. 

In a new open letter, six prominent scientists and diplomats, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, wrote that the world has approximately three years before the worst effects of climate change take hold. Published June 28, the letter urges governments, businesses, scientists, and citizens to address the world's greenhouse-gas emissions now.

Read the Business Insider story by Leanna Garfield - “A group of prominent scientists says we have three years to save the planet from irreversible destruction.”

Switzerland, where are your two extra planets?

Happy anniversary! It is now just one year since Swiss voters decided whether they want to live within the means of one Earth by 2050.

The Swiss aim to live within their means.

If everybody on this planet lived like people in Switzerland today, it would take more than three planet Earths to provide all they demand.

Could Switzerland have moved to a one-Earth economy by 2050, as proposed by the ballot measure? Would it have been too fast? Would it be a loss or a gain?

The ballot’s goal was consistent with what the Paris Climate Agreement requires: to restrain global warming on average to less than 2 degrees Celsius depends on moving out of fossil fuel use way before 2050. Given the large fossil fuel dependence of Switzerland, making up 72% of the Swiss Ecological Footprint, and given the technical possibilities to decarbonize energy substantively, living up to the Paris goal would be consistent with achieving a one-Earth economy by 2050. That’s a goal the Swiss government already signed up for one year prior to the popular ballot.

Read the Global Footprint Network story - “Switzerland, where are your two extra planets?"

Scientists stunned by Antarctic rainfall and a melt area bigger than Texas

Scientists have documented a recent, massive melt event on the surface of highly vulnerable West Antarctica that, they fear, could be a harbinger of future events as the planet continues to warm.

An iceberg lies in the Ross Sea with Mount Erebus
in the background near McMurdo Station in Antarctica,
 November 11, 2016. A sheet of meltwater lasted for as long
as 15 days in some places on the surface of the Ross Ice
Shelf, the largest floating ice platform on Earth, during the
 Antarctic summer of 2016.

In the Antarctic summer of 2016, the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest floating ice platform on Earth, developed a sheet of meltwater that lasted for as long as 15 days in some places. The total area affected by melt was 300,000 square miles, or larger than the state of Texas, the scientists report.

That’s bad news because surface melting could work hand in hand with an already documented trend of ocean-driven melting to compromise West Antarctica, which contains over 10 feet of potential sea level rise.

Read The Washington Post story - “Scientists stunned by Antarctic rainfall and a melt area bigger than Texas.”

How a 94-Year-Old Genius May Save the Planet.

A man old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s great-grandfather just unveiled energy storage technology that might save the planet.  

Saving the planet can be grubby work.

John Goodenough is 94, and his current work could be the key to Tesla’s future—much as, decades ago, his efforts were an important part of Sony’s era of dominance in portable gadgets. Over the years, Goodenough has scuffled with Warren Buffett, wound up screwed by global patent wars, never got rich off a headline-grabbing initial public offering and defied the American tech industry’s prejudice that says old people can’t innovate.

Contrast that with the way we celebrate Evan Spiegel, who at 26 is worth $5 billion because he co-created Snapchat, an app that will probably impact humanity over the long run as profoundly as Cap’n Crunch cereal. Maybe.

Read the Alternet story - “How a 94-Year-Old Genius May Save the Planet.”

Unprecedented heat to exceed historical records - study finds

By 2060, large swaths of the planet could be hit by unprecedented heat waves during the summer months that would exceed all historical records, according to a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Just as a severe heat wave sizzles the U.S. Southwest, sending temperatures in parts of Arizona to 120 degrees, this new study predicts similarly dangerous heat will become more commonplace. Without major reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, the study said there is a 90 percent chance that every summer will be at least as warm as the hottest to date across large parts of North and South America, Central Europe, Asia and Africa. 

That means summers like 2012, when extreme heat was blamed for 32 deaths in a two-week period across the U.S., will become the new normal.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Without Emissions Cuts, Summer Heat Will Get Even Deadlier.”

Pope Francis doesn't just talk about climate change, he acts

P

Pope Francis - putting his
 muscle where his mouth when
it comes to climate change.

ope Francis is certainly putting his muscle where his mouth is when it comes to climate change.

Just a month after his ground-breaking Encyclical on the topic, the Vatican will host a workshop called “Modern Slavery and Climate Change: The Commitment of Cities,” followed by a symposium on “Prosperity, People and Planet: Achieving Sustainable Development in Our Cities.”

Read the EcoWatch story - “Pope Francis to Hold First-Ever Gathering of Mayors at Vatican to Rev Up Fight Against Climate Change”.

Divestment is okay, but alone it will not halt global warming - Bill Gates

F

ossil fuel divestment would be ineffective on its own as a means of halting global warming, software billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates said.

Pulling money out of carbon-heavy industry must be coupled with large spending on alternative technologies to make any difference, said the Microsoft mogul who is under fire for his charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's reported $1.4-billion (1.3-billion-euro) investment in carbon-spewing companies like BP.

The Financial Times reported an announcement Friday by Gates that he will invest $2 billion in green energy, but would not pull his money out of companies that pump out carbon emissions blamed for the planet-warming greenhouse effect.

"I think the solution is investment," Gates said later in Paris on the sidelines of the Solidays anti-AIDS-themed concert, which he backs.

"My concern is that I love the fact that students and people care about climate change, and I don't want to make them think that if they get people to divest that they've solved climate change."

Gates, who speaks of climate change as a major threat to the planet, said he was "not really against divestment", as long as it was coupled with "some serious investments in breakthrough technology."

Read the Times Live story - “Fossil fuel divestment alone will not halt climate change: Gates”.

A defenceless earth staggers into the 'Lasf Chance Saloon'

H

ard bargaining in Bonn this week will probably decide whether the crucial climate talks in Paris in December can save human civilisation from ultimate collapse, Climate News Network reports.

It says: “The text of the agreement on how the world will tackle climate change and set targets that will keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels is being negotiated in Bonn this week.

“The 2°C limit has been set by politicians to prevent the planet overheating dangerously − but the cuts in carbon emissions required to achieve it have so far not been agreed.

“It is this gap between the policy goals agreed  by world leaders and their lack of action to achieve them that the Bonn conference seeks to address.

“The meeting, which opened today, will last for 10 days as working groups grapple with action to reduce carbon emissions, how to finance technology transfer, and how to adapt to sea level rise and other unavoidable consequences of present warming − such as the current heatwave affecting India, where temperatures in some southern states have topped 47°C,” it reports.

Read the Climate News Network story - “Overheating Earth staggers into Last Chance Saloon”.

A day for us to think deeply about the water upon which we depend

W

ater. It covers 71% of our planet's surface, which is really something special: the Earth is the only known planet with large, stable bodies of liquid water on its surface.

Water and energy are inseparably intertwined and today, on World Water Day, we acknowledge our obligation—and our need—to ensure they innovate and improve together.

As a society, we use a tremendous amount of water to generate electricity...

 …and a tremendous amount of electricity to pump and purify our water.

Demand for water is expected to grow 40% by 2030—and as climate change makes water more scarce in many regions, it's absolutely critical that we use water with maximum efficiency.

Today, the next time you take a drink of water or turn on the lights, take a moment to appreciate it and make a commitment to yourself to protect it.

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.