[TheClimate.Vote] July 10, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News

[Richard Pauli]

/July 10, 2017/
*
**Raging wildfires across California force nearly 8000 to evacuate: 'It 
was terrifying' 
<http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-wildfires-20170709-story.html>*
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-wildfires-20170709-story.html
*A state of emergency has been declared by the Canadian province of 
British Columbia (BC) as it battles over 180 wildfires. 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40534648>*
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40534648
*Towns, homes evacuated in B.C. as wildfires burn out of control 
<http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/towns-homes-evacuated-in-b-c-as-wildfires-burn-out-of-control-1.4196041>*
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/towns-homes-evacuated-in-b-c-as-wildfires-burn-out-of-control-1.4196041
*Large Wildfires Force Evacuations In California; 5000 Firefighters 
Deployed 
<http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/09/536316047/large-wildfires-force-evacuations-in-central-california>*
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/09/536316047/large-wildfires-force-evacuations-in-central-california
*Wildfires burn across more than 15680 acres in western Colorado 
<http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/09/wildfires-burn-across-western-colorado/>*
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/09/wildfires-burn-across-western-colorado/
*Western Canada wildfires may spread with more hot, dry weather 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-wildfire-idUSKBN19V005>*
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-wildfire-idUSKBN19V005
*Soaring temperatures fuel wildfires across 11 western states 
<http://www.today.com/video/soaring-temperatures-fuel-wildfires-across-11-western-states-988987459812>*
http://www.today.com/video/soaring-temperatures-fuel-wildfires-across-11-western-states-988987459812
*(video) Firefighters battle wildfires across the West 
<https://youtu.be/NlKKH74HBGE>*
https://youtu.be/NlKKH74HBGE
*American Red Cross offers tips to prepare for wildfires 
<http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/communities/belle_fourche/american-red-cross-offers-tips-to-prepare-for-wildfires/article_eec34ece-4f6c-5f69-a073-84c5a884df09.html>*
http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/communities/belle_fourche/american-red-cross-offers-tips-to-prepare-for-wildfires/article_eec34ece-4f6c-5f69-a073-84c5a884df09.html


When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>*
**The Uninhabitable Earth* 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change 
could wreak - sooner than you think.
By David Wallace-Wells*
**I. 'Doomsday'*
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global 
warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely 
scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the 
lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas - and the cities 
they will drown - have so dominated the picture of global warming, and 
so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded 
our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans 
are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans 
conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to 
uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the 
end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to 
comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 
degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole,...
.. And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have 
already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another 
thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked 
it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system 
that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it 
destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular 
oceanographer who coined the term "global warming," means when he calls 
the planet an "angry beast." You could also go with "war machine." Each 
day we arm it more.
*II. Heat Death*
The bahraining of New York.
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to 
continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs 
to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing 
heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of 
warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet's 
equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the 
problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity 
routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it's over 
105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: 
Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both 
inside and out.
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled 
many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human 
life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 
or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world's population, as 
distributed today, would die of direct heat...
The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term 
of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered 
on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it's swung around in the air 
(since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this 
single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions 
reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line 
for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much 
sooner....
..The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By 
the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months 
in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be 
warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. 
Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon 
problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, 
it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest 
parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the 
crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, 
where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 
degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will 
become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the 
pilgrimage each year.
*III. The End of Food*
Praying for cornfields in the tundra.
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal 
crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, 
yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 
17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the 
end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to 
feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It 
takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger 
meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate 
with methane farts.
Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop 
math applies only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, 
and they are right - theoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier 
to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond 
Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to 
efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today 
are already at optimal growing temperature - which means even a small 
warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you 
can't easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in 
places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil 
there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally 
fertile dirt.
*IV. Climate Plagues*
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?
Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long 
as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into 
strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. 
Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen 
history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, 
trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for 
millions of years - in some cases, since before humans were around to 
encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to 
fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In 
Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu 
that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million - 
about 5 percent of the world's population and almost six times as many 
as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of 
gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect 
smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too - an 
abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad 
in the Arctic sun.
...What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing 
scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. ...
*V. Unbreathable Air*
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. 
The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per 
million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends 
suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared 
to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in 
pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the 
planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will 
likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the 
National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many 
as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO "safe" 
level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant 
mother's exposure to ozone raises the child's risk of autism (as much as 
tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you 
think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood....
*VI. Perpetual War*
The violence baked into heat.
Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you 
to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed 
to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the 
result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same 
crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang 
have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between 
temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, 
societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the 
likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but 
the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at 
least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict 
could more than double this century.
This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to 
pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The 
drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, 
but being the world's policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime 
rate doubles. ...
*VII. Permanent Economic Collapse*
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.
The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between 
the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that 
economic growth would save us from anything and everything.
But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians 
studying what they call "fossil capitalism" have begun to suggest that 
the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat 
suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade 
or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil 
fuels and all their raw power - a onetime injection of new "value" into 
a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence 
living....
*VIII. Poisoned Oceans*
Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.
That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical 
reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise 
and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world's major 
cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy 
bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy 
empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and 
much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million 
people live within ten meters of sea level today.
But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more 
than a third of the world's carbon is sucked up by the oceans - thank 
God, or else we'd have that much more warming already. But the result is 
what's called "ocean acidification," which, on its own, may add a half a 
degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the 
planet's water basins...
*IX. The Great Filter*
Our present eeriness cannot last.
So why can't we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great 
Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming 
and natural disaster haven't become major subjects of contemporary 
fiction - why we don't seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why 
we haven't yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines 
into half-existence and names "the environmental uncanny." "Consider, 
for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, 'Where were 
you when the Berlin Wall fell?' or 'Where were you on 9/11?' " he 
writes. "Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, 'Where were 
you at 400 ppm?' or 'Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke 
up?' " His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of 
climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell 
ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize 
the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma 
of social fate....
...But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the 
atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three 
decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which 
means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has 
brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of 
the industrial world's kamikaze mission is also the story of a single 
lifetime...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
*

**Can We Stop Climate Change? Maybe, If We Take Steps Now to Stop 
Emitting Greenhouse Gases 
<http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-environment-greenhouse-gases-donald-trump-633796>*
If we stop our emissions today, we won't go back to the past. The Earth 
will warm. And since the response to warming is more warming through 
feedbacks associated with melting ice and increased atmospheric water 
vapor, our job becomes one of limiting the warming. If greenhouse gas 
emissions are eliminated quickly enough, within a small number of 
decades, it will keep the warming manageable and the Paris Agreement 
goals could be met. It will slow the change – and allow us to adapt. 
Rather than trying to recover the past, we need to be thinking about 
best possible futures.
http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-environment-greenhouse-gases-donald-trump-633796
*If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop 
climate change? 
<https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882>*
Earth's climate is changing rapidly. We know this from billions of 
observations, documented in thousands of journal papers and texts and 
summarized every few years by the United Nations' Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change. The primary cause of that change is the release 
of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
One of the goals of the international Paris Agreement on climate change 
is to limit the increase of the global surface average air temperature 
to 2 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial times. There is a 
further commitment to strive to limit the increase to 1.5℃.
Earth has already, essentially, reached the 1℃ threshold. Despite the 
avoidance of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions through use of 
renewable energy, increased efficiency and conservation efforts, the 
rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remains high.
International plans on how to deal with climate change are painstakingly 
difficult to cobble together and take decades to work out. Most climate 
scientists and negotiators were dismayed by President Trump's 
announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882


*(51 mins audio)  On The Media   Apocalypse, Now 
<http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07>*
Science fiction has always been an outlet for our greatest anxieties. 
How the genre is exploring the reality of climate change.
Plus: new words to describe the indescribable.
Science fiction has always been an outlet for our greatest anxieties. 
This week, we delve into how the genre is exploring the reality of 
climate change.   . Plus: new words to describe the indescribable.
1. Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy 
and Borne, on writing about the relationships between people and nature.
While apocalyptic narratives have been part of popular culture for 
centuries and are common subject matter for films and literature, such 
stories now seem scarily realistic given the increasing impact of 
climate change.  Brooke speaks with...VanderMeer about the 
responsibility of fiction to illuminate the threats of climate change 
and human degradation of the planet, and how he imagines what our 
existence will look like in the coming years. His latest novel is Borne, 
and part of his Southern Reach Trilogy is being adapted as a movie for 
release next year.
2. Claire Vaye Watkins @clairevaye talks about Gold Fame Citrus, her 
work of speculative fiction in which an enormous sand dune threatens to 
engulf the southwest... extreme drought has left California baked and 
barren - and a massive dune threatens the entire Southwest. Watkins 
talks to Brooke about the world she imagines, and the pain of being a 
climate change refugee. Storytelling, she says, might help the public 
understand the real looming threats.
3. Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his latest work, New York 2140. The 
seas have risen 50 feet and lower Manhattan is submerged. And yet, 
there's hope.   (The science fiction writer... speaks with Brooke about 
his new book New York 2140, in which Manhattan is partially submerged by 
water and citizens travel using boats, similar to Venice. He discusses 
the role of fiction as a blueprint for hope, and why his New York City 
of the future still struggles with capitalist impulses-the same ones he 
says are responsible for climate change today.
4. British writer Robert Macfarlane @RobGMacfarlane on new language for 
our changing world... author of Landmarks and The Old Ways and a fellow 
at Cambridge University, believes we need new words to describe our 
changing Earth and the feelings ecological destruction stirs within us 
all. He talks to Brooke about how new terms can help us come to grips 
with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways humans are altering the 
environment, and how naming something can be a way of preserving it.
Throughout the show: listeners offer their own new vocabulary for the 
Anthropocene era. Many thanks to everyone who left us voice memos!
http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07
-also:
The Leonard Lopate Show
*A Scientist Bikes To Understand Misinformation 
<http://www.wnyc.org/story/scientist-rides-understand-misinformation>*
Climate scientist David Goodrich on his book "A Hole In The Wind," about 
his cross-country bicycle trip to understand how misinformation about 
science and the environment spreads. Jul 5, 2017
Climate scientist David Goodrich joins us to discuss his book A Hole in 
the Wind: A Climate Scientist's Bicycle Journey Across the United 
States. Goodrich biked 4,200 miles from Maryland across the country to 
Oregon to find out how misinformation about science and the environment 
spreads. Along the way, he learned why climate change is such a 
complicated issue for so many Americans.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/scientist-rides-understand-misinformation


*Climate Change Will Also Exacerbate Wealth Inequality 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/07/these_maps_show_just_how_climate_change_will_screw_the_poor.html>*
New data make stunning predictions about how climate change will affect 
specific regions of the United States.
Climate change is a global problem with extremely local impacts. A major 
new study illuminates how the effects of climate change will reverberate 
economically across the United States. Its findings are both a warning 
of challenges to come and an opportunity to recalibrate how resources 
are allocated to protect Americans from global warming's negative 
repercussions.
Published in the journal Science, the study found that unmitigated 
climate change will make the United States "poorer and more unequal," 
with the poorest third of counties across the country potentially 
sustaining economic damages costing as much as 20 percent of their 
income. Furthermore, if emissions are not slowed and the planet warms 
6-10 degrees Fahrenheit (3-5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels 
by the end of the century, costs will approach those of the Great 
Recession-"except they will not go away afterwards and damages for poor 
regions will be many times larger."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/07/these_maps_show_just_how_climate_change_will_screw_the_poor.html
thanks to http://www.climatedesk.org/
*
**
*Ethics and Climate: The Moral Outrageousness of Trump's Decision on the 
Paris Agreement 
<https://ethicsandclimate.org/2017/07/07/the-moral-outrageousness-of-trumps-decision-on-the-paris-agreement/>**
Donald A. BrownScholar In Residence and Professor
Widener University Commonwealth Law School dabrown57 at gmail.com
When Pope Francis in May of 2015 issued his Laudata Si encyclical which 
called climate change a moral issue, it got global attention. Yet 
despite extensive international media coverage of worldwide condemnation 
of President Trump's decision to remove the United States from the Paris 
agreement, there has been relatively little coverage of why the Trump 
decision should be understood not only as a dangerous break with the 
international community but as a profoundly immoral choice....
Climate change has certain features that more than any other global 
environmental problem call for responding to it as a moral problem. 
First, it is a problem caused mostly by high-emitting developed 
countries that are putting relatively low emitting developing countries 
most at risk. Second, the potential harms to the most vulnerable nations 
and people are not mere inconveniences but include catastrophic threats 
to life and the ecological systems on which life depends. Third, those 
people and nations most at risk can do little to protect themselves by 
petitioning their governments to shield them; their best hope is that 
high-emitting nations will respond to their obligations to not harm 
others. Fourth CO2 emissions become well mixed in the atmosphere so that 
CO2 atmosphere concentrations are roughly the same around the world 
regardless of the source of the emissions. Therefore unlike other air 
pollution problems which most threaten only those nations and 
communities located within the pollution plume, greenhouse gas emissions 
from any one country are threatening people and other countries around 
the world.  This means that US greenhouse gas emissions are causing and 
threatening enormous harm all over the world....
Yet it is the Trump assertion that the United States can base its energy 
policy primarily on putting US economic interests first while ignoring 
US obligations to not harm others that most clearly provokes moral 
outrage around the world. The moral principle that people may not harm 
others on the basis of self-interest is recognized by the vast majority 
of the world's religions and in international law under the "no harm 
principle".  The "no- harm' rule is a principle of customary 
international law whereby a nation is duty-bound to prevent, reduce, and 
control the risk of environmental harm to other nations caused by 
activities within the nation  For these reasons, the Trump decision on 
the Paris Agreement is a moral travesty.
https://ethicsandclimate.org/2017/07/07/the-moral-outrageousness-of-trumps-decision-on-the-paris-agreement*


**(video) California fires spread quickly, evacuation orders lifted in 
other parts of West 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfires-spread-quickly-evacuation-orders-lifted-colorado-montana/>*
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - A pair of California wildfires have quickly 
spread, threatening hundreds of homes and forcing evacuations at a 
popular lakeside campground and a summer camp where flames temporarily 
trapped children and counselors, a fire official said.
In other parts of the West, evacuation orders were lifted in Colorado 
and Montana towns threatened by wildfires, while air and ground crews 
battled a growing grass fire in northwestern Colorado.
The fire that started early Saturday afternoon in California's Santa 
Barbara County had spread to both sides of Highway 154 and was 
"completely out of control," county fire Capt. Dave Zaniboni said. About 
90 children and 50 counselors were struck at the Circle V Ranch and had 
to take shelter there until they could be safely evacuated.
The Santa Barbara County fire was one of three in California that grew 
quickly as much of the state baked in heat that broke records. A record 
that stood 131 years in Los Angeles was snapped when the temperature 
spiked at 98 degrees downtown. The previous record of 95 degrees was set 
in 1886, the National Weather Service said.
Excessive heat sent Southern Californians flocking to beaches and in 
search of water, shade and air conditioning to escape the heat. 
Forecasters warned that triple-digit temperatures up to 110 degrees 
would be common in some inland areas and could be deadly for the 
elderly, children and outdoor workers. Air quality reached unhealthy and 
very unhealthy in areas inland from Los Angeles.
Brutally hot temperatures have been recorded across the Southwest, CBS 
News' Chris Martinez reported. Phoenix hit a high of 118 degrees Friday, 
breaking a 112-year record. Palm Springs, California, reached 122 
degrees, one of its hottest days ever. And in Death Valley, the mercury 
soared to 127.
"We are going to see an increase in calls during this peak heat," said 
Los Angeles Fire Captain Erik Scott.
Scott said many people ignore the very real risks of spending too much 
time outdoors. And even for the most seasoned veterans, "firefighters 
are not exempt to this heat themselves," Scott said.
"Firefighters take with them to a fire 100 extra pounds - you have 
temperatures up to 112 degrees right now, it's very challenging," Scott 
said.
High temps and dry gusts tripled the size of another Santa Barbara 
wildfire to nearly 30 square miles over eight hours and forced 
evacuations of about 200 homes in a rural area east of Santa Maria, fire 
spokesman Kirk Sturm said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfires-spread-quickly-evacuation-orders-lifted-colorado-montana/
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/record-breaking-heat-fuels-wildfires/


*Trump and the Truth About Climate Change 
<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-climate-change-fairness-argument-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-2017-07>* 

Joseph E. Stiglitz       Follow @JosephEStiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic 
Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979
BRUSSELS - Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States 
took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on 
June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, 
Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 
2012, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese 
in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive." But this was not the 
reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. 
Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly 
unfair to it.
In fact, the major flaw in Trump's reasoning is that combating climate 
change would strengthen the US, not weaken it. Trump is looking toward 
the past – a past that, ironically, was not that great. His promise to 
restore coal-mining jobs (which now number 51,000, less than 0.04% of 
the country's nonfarm employment) overlooks the harsh conditions and 
health risks endemic in that industry, not to mention the technological 
advances that would continue to reduce employment in the industry even 
if coal production were revived.
In fact, far more jobs are being created in solar panel installation 
than are being lost in coal. More generally, moving to a green economy 
would increase US income today and economic growth in the future. In 
this, as in so many things, Trump is hopelessly mired in the past.
America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of 
derision. In the aftermath of Trump's withdrawal of the US from the 
Paris accord, a large sign was hung over Rome's city hall: "The Planet 
First." Likewise, France's new president, Emmanuel Macron, poked fun at 
Trump's campaign slogan, declaring "Make Our Planet Great Again."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-climate-change-fairness-argument-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2017-07


*Dozens of EPA Staffers Weigh In on the Damage Trump Has Inflicted 
<http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/epa-staffers-weigh-in-on-trump-damage/>*
Morale is seriously low.
REBECCA LEBERJ
Typically, when presidents or vice presidents visit EPA headquarters to 
give a speech, they've used the opportunity to highlight the work the 
EPA does, not to reprimand employees. Trump's visit to sign an executive 
order in March was different. Few if any staffers were invited to attend 
the speech where Trump, surrounded by coal miners, declared the agency's 
supposed war on coal to be over. "Nobody was invited to [Trump's visit 
to EPA HQ] which was as in your face, insulting thing as I've 
experienced in my time here," one person says in the report.
In another excerpt, a staffer describes the surreal atmosphere that's 
turning regulators into yes-men: "I mean every day, every single day 
there's one more surreal thing, and everybody is afraid. Everybody's 
afraid so no one pushes back, nobody says anything. They kind of hem and 
haw [around Pruitt]."
One EPA employee noted that he or she's seen more self-policing from 
colleagues, while others noted a new level of resistance to the agency's 
leadership. "I have worked under six Administrations with political 
appointees leading EPA from both parties," one says. "This is the first 
time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental 
policies of an Administration and by extension [Pruitt]."
Over the course of its 47-year-history, EPA staff have faced off with 
other hostile presidents and survived. But from how the veterans tell 
it, Trump's assault is unlike anything they've seen before.
"I think there's a general consensus among the career people," one 
person says, "that at bottom they're basically trying to destroy the place."
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/epa-staffers-weigh-in-on-trump-damage/


*Pingos Expose Global Warming Threat to Humanity 
<http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pingos-expose-global-warming-threat-to-humanity/article64484.html>*
Already, Russian scientists have identified 7,000 "alternative pingos" 
in Siberia. According to The Washington Post, "Russian Scientists Find 
7,000 Siberian Hills Possibly Filled with Explosive Gas," March 27, 
2017, Vladimir E. Romanovsky, geophysicist at the University of Alaska 
in Fairbanks claims: "This is really a new thing to permafrost science. 
It has not been reported in the literature before," Ibid. Romanovsky 
estimates there could be as many as 100,000 "alternative pingos" 
(smaller than regular pingos) across the entire Arctic permafrost.
If we did not have anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, pingos 
would not suddenly be ubiquitous, and there would be no reason to write 
this article. However, thousands of earthen hills have been popping-up 
in the lower Arctic regions. The operative question therefore is whether 
pingos, by releasing methane, will accelerate global warming, leading to 
way too much heat, and runaway global warming, resulting in burnout of 
agriculture. Then, starvation sets in for millions, maybe billions. 
Thereafter, global warfare reigns supreme. Life turns sour. No Hollywood 
film has ever captured the essence of the shockingly appalling scenario 
that unfolds, but the TV series The Walking Dead sure seems close. Do 
films reflect future society?
http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pingos-expose-global-warming-threat-to-humanity/article64484.html


<http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA>*This Day in Climate History July 10, 2007 
<http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA> -  from D.R. Tucker**
*July 10, 2007: On MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," Air America 
host Rachel Maddow points out the mainstream media's fetish for false 
balance, specifically citing climate coverage.
http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA*
* ------------------------------------------/
////You are encouraged to forward this email /

        . *** Privacy and Security: * This is a text-only mailing that
        carries no images which may originate from remote servers.
        Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
        sender.
        By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for
        democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
        commercial purposes.
        To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote with subject: 
        subscribe,  To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe
        Also youmay subscribe/unsubscribe at
        https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
        Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Paulifor
        http://TheClimate.Vote delivering succinct information for
        citizens and responsible governments of all levels.   List
        membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
        restricted to this mailing list.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20170710/2225a9a0/attachment.html>