[TheClimate.Vote] November 20, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Nov 20 09:30:42 EST 2018
/November 20, 2018/
[post combustion]
*Trapped in the Fire Zone
<https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/california-camp-fire-evacuation-survivors-paradise-pulga.html>*
The Camp Fire closed in too fast for some survivors to leave. And many
families who evacuated have nowhere to go.
By April Glaser
Nov 20, 2018
Last Wednesday morning, as a fellow reporter and I drove the three and a
half hours from Oakland, California, to the tiny town of Pulga, our
phones kept telling us to turn around. Thanks to the Camp Fire, a
roughly 200-square-mile swath of Butte County and the surrounding area
is now burnt or burning. Google Maps knew this, rerouting us around the
evacuation zone every time we typed in our destination. Since the fire
began on the morning of Thursday, Nov. 8, it has killed at least 77
people--a number that increases every day as investigators and rescue
dogs find more remains. The list of missing persons initially grew until
it passed 1,200, but is finally starting to shrink. As of Friday, only
firefighters, electric company workers, railroaders, emergency
personnel, and credentialed journalists were being allowed into the
evacuated area. The officer at our first checkpoint said officials have
caught people trying use forged documentation to enter the evacuation
zone to loot the few homes that didn't burn down in the blaze...
- -
Not everyone has fire insurance. Applying for FEMA aid requires the kind
of paperwork most survivors may no longer have handy, like their
insurance information. The will to rebuild felt strong among everyone I
spoke to--Butte County is their home. But community isn't something that
stands strong on its own. It requires a space for people to gather, to
communicate, to realize that for better or worse they are in something
together. As the days the evacuation zone remains active continue to add
up, as investigators continue to look for and identify remains and
determine the Camp Fire's cause, the weight of shared uncertainty that
appears to have united so many--to save pets and protect each other's
salvaged belongings in the tent cities now being disbanded--may force
some to look out more for themselves.
It's supposed to rain on Wednesday. Water can extinguish fire. But after
a firestorm, rain can also push burned trees down mountains so they
might clog waterways, causing flooding and mudslides. The Camp Fire may
soon be out, but there are still thousands of people with nowhere to go.
The blaze took what it wanted, which appears to be almost everything.
The now-hollowed-out towns and skeletal forests left in its wake aren't
a sure foundation on which to rebuild. They're the groundwork of the
next crisis.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/11/california-camp-fire-evacuation-survivors-paradise-pulga.html
[Military watches carefully]
*Climate and Security in the News Today
<https://climateandsecurity.org/2018/11/19/climate-and-security-in-the-news-today/>*
Four news stories were published today on the intersection of climate
change and national security, and all are worth a read.
- -
"Rising seas threaten Norfolk Naval Shipyard, raising fears of
'catastrophic damage'
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rising-seas-threaten-norfolk-naval-shipyard-raising-fears-catastrophic-damage-n937396>,"
by Nicholas Kusnetz of Inside Climate News, and also published on NBC
News. The article features quotes from Center for Climate and Security
Advisory Board members Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret); Rear
Admiral David Titley, USN (Ret); and Rear Admiral Jonathan White, USN (Ret).
- - -
"Climate Change and National Security, Part I: What is the Threat,
When's It Coming, and How Bad Will It Be?
<https://www.lawfareblog.com/climate-change-and-national-security-part-i-what-threat-whens-it-coming-and-how-bad-will-it-be>"
by Michelle Melton at the popular Lawfare blog. The article is part of a
multi-part series, and does a great job of breaking down the basics of
climate change and national security, and includes a link to our list of
eighteen senior defense officials who have identified climate change as
a national security issue. In fact, with General Joe Dunford's recent
statement, that makes nineteen.
- - -
"Dangers Without Borders: Military Readiness in a Warming World
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19112018/military-readiness-climate-change-risk-hurricane-heat-sea-level-rise-dangers-without-borders>,"
by Neela Banerjee of Inside Climate News. The article is the first in a
series called "Dangers without Borders," which will examine "how the
looming risks from global warming have become a soft underbelly of U.S.
military readiness, threatening national security."
- - -
"'Like a Terror Movie': How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous
Disasters
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/climate/climate-disasters.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>,"
by John Schwartz at the New York Times, covers the publication today of
a new study in the academic journal Nature Climate Change that finds
"traceable evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water, food,
economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by
climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought,
floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover
and ocean chemistry."
For a full list of climate and security news items over the past few
weeks, see our Week in Review.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2018/11/19/climate-and-security-weeks-in-review-november-5-18/
https://climateandsecurity.org/2018/11/19/climate-and-security-in-the-news-today/
[NYTimes and Nature climate change]
*'Like a Terror Movie': How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous
Disasters
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/climate/climate-disasters.html>*
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/climate/climate-disasters.html
- - - -
*Broad threat to humanity from cumulative climate hazards intensified by
greenhouse gas emissions
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0315-6>*
Abstract
The ongoing emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is triggering
changes in many climate hazards that can impact humanity. We found
traceable evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water,
food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently
impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves,
precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and
changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry. By 2100, the
world's population will be exposed concurrently to the equivalent of
the largest magnitude in one of these hazards if emissions are
aggressively reduced, or three if they are not, with some tropical
coastal areas facing up to six simultaneous hazards. These findings
highlight the fact that GHG emissions pose a broad threat to
humanity by intensifying multiple hazards to which humanity is
vulnerable.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0315-6
- - --
[Must-see matrix of 467 pathways based on 6,129 entries]
*Traceable evidence of the impacts of climate change on humanity
<http://impactsofclimatechange.info/>*
Climatic Change:
Natural cover change - Drought - Warming - Heatwaves Storms -
Precipitation - Floods - Fires - Sea level - Ocean climate change
http://impactsofclimatechange.info/
[Letters to the Guardian]
*Essential reading on climate change
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/19/essential-reading-on-climate-change>*
George Monbiot and Keith Kahn-Harris are thought-provoking, says
Penelope Maclachlan, while Peter Wheeler believes natural climate
solutions are the way forward
George Monbiot's observations (The Earth is in a death spiral. The only
hope is radical action
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/earth-death-spiral-radical-action-climate-breakdown>,
14 November) are well worth reading and thought-provoking. At one point
he writes: "Academics, afraid to upset their funders, have bitten their
lips."
There are exceptions. Keith Kahn-Harris's book Denial: The Unspeakable
Truth ought be compulsory reading for every university student of
English, history and moral philosophy. He seems an academic who has
definitely not bitten his lip, but sought to penetrate a fog of lies
perpetuated by denialists: those who shout down and treat with contempt
the historians and scientists who have sought the truth and presented us
with their findings.
Climate change
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change>denialists
dredge up countless explanations for floods and fires. Donald Trump
blames "poor forest management" for the conflagrations in California
that have killed many people.
Monbiot and Kahn-Harris ought to be on the reading lists of all of us
who seek to understand truths about the planet that we share with fellow
human beings, animals and plants.
*Penelope Maclachlan*
/London/
•We applaud the Committee on Climate Change's recommendations to shift
land use from inefficient food production towards restoring forests and
other climate-critical landscapes (Tree planting in UK 'must double to
tackle climate change'
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/15/tree-planting-double-uk-climate-change>,
15 November). We have solid science showing natural climate solutions
can deliver 37% of the carbon reductions required to meet the Paris
agreement. We have also publisheda study
<https://www.nature.org/en-us/explore/newsroom/natural-climate-solutions-study/>showing
natural solutions could mitigate more than a fifth of US carbon
emissions. These solutions are proven and available right now.
Enshrining them in policy would be a massive step forward.
*Peter Wheeler*
/Executive vice-president, The Nature Conservancy/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/19/essential-reading-on-climate-change
[Climate Fiction as subset of Sci-Fi]
*The future for cli-fi: interview with Dan Bloom
<https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/literature-and-science/blog/ecologyandenvironment/danbloom/>*
Posted on: 16 November 2018 by Bernadette McBride in Ecology and Environment
Liverpool PhD Student Bernadette McBride, interviews the journalist Dan
Bloom, who coined the phrase 'Cli-Fi, for the Literature and Science
Hub, University of Liverpool.
BM
This year, 2018, marks the tenth anniversary of you coining the now
infamous literary term 'cli-fi' in 2008. Even early on, the term was
endorsed by great authors such as Margaret Atwood and has since gathered
momentum across the globe. A decade on, our climate situation is more
perilous than ever and by no coincidence, the cli-fi genre output is
greater than ever. Have you noticed a pattern in the production of
cli-fi as awareness of the Anthropocene has developed since you first
coined the term cli-fi?
DB
I've noticed a definite pattern in the production of cli-fi over the
past ten years, and each time a new IPCC report came out, beginning in
2006 and including the recent report released in late 2018, awareness of
the need for a new literary genre to address the issues of global
climate change and runaway global warming has increased year by year.
Newspaper headlines about the issues, in tandem with academic papers
tackling both cli-fi movies and novels and amplified by websites and
social media on the internet, mostly in Anglophone countries, fueled
readers' hunger for cli-fi and pushed more and more writers to sit down
and start writing cli-fi. I think the 2020s will see a full flowering of
cli-fi productions and into the 2030s and 2040s as well. In fact, I
think the 21st Century will be known as the Age of Cli-Fi.
BM
In the past, you've said that we need the cli-fi equivalent of the 1957
pulp classic On the Beach by Nevil Shute to shock people into awareness.
Climate change is such a complex issue, governed by so many factors,
some within and some out of our control, unfairly often affecting those
who have least contributed towards the problem. There seems to be a
multifaceted approach by writers doing cli-fi – from literary fiction
such as The MaddAddam Trilogy: Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood,
MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood, to self-published indie authors, to a
recent short story series by Amazon originals. Is this the way forward
to drawing attention to a serious planetary problem that can also, only
surely be tackled with a direct, yet multifaceted approach?
DB
A multifaceted approach will work best and be most productive. It will
take a global chorus of novelists, film directors, poets, playwrights
and academics to focus attention on the existential risks of a
continually warming planet.
I don't think one novel, or one blockbuster movie can do the trick
anymore. Although I still personally dream of someday seeing the
publication of the On The Beach of climate change. In the end, though,
many voices will become one pronounced voice.
BM
You've read a sample of Bunkers, my own contribution to cli-fi, a
creative product of my ongoing doctoral research. Bunkers as a title
alludes to several things; people hiding in purpose-built bunkers (or
metaphorical bunkers – e.g. on social media) instead of facing reality,
and also the term 'to do a bunk', which means to run away from
something, i.e. skip school, or jump ship. By my own admission, this
work is by no means the On The Beach of cli-fi – through humour, the
characters become relatable and sympathetic, the narrator also satirises
those who live in denial, or in a bubble. Do you think humour in cli-fi
has the potential to disarm the reader and pull them into to engage with
climate issues?
DB
I am a big believer in using humour and satire and comic relief to reach
readers. Think of the power of A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. Or
the satire inside of Nathaniel rich's 2013 novel Odds Against Tomorrow.
I think your novel will disarm the reader in a positive way. Bunkers,
and its various meanings, is a superb way to bring readers into your camp.
BM
Climate scientists are the ones with all the vital information, and yet
for years, they have struggled to get their message across – the arts
have been a strand of communication they have come to lean upon – people
enjoy art, theatre and books – not data graphs. From Frankenstein,
scientists have been traditionally depicted in literature as mad or bad
– perhaps there is a call for more fiction which evokes the modern-day
real-life scientist as a relatable, human, and sympathetic character.
Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, and Ian McEwan's Solar, both
achieve this. Do you think cli-fi could act as a go-between in
communication between the lay reader and the climate scientist?
DB
I do think cli-fi can serve as a bridge between scientists and lay
readers. That's always been my vision. There's even a subgenre now
called lab-lit, coined by Jennifer Rohn in London, for novels about the
trials and tribulations of scientists and lab technicians. I like the
concept and I applaud Dr Rohn's creativity and gumption.
BM
If you walk into any major book chain store there is now an abundance of
novels and non-fiction books with nature themes, and the rise of a genre
called 'new nature writing'. I've been following this trend and it seems
the more news there is about the vulnerability of our climate, the more
people feel the need to write about and publish work on nature as we
know it now. It struck me that it's almost a memorialisation for the
world as we know it… Many feel psychologically displaced by our
impending climate crisis, and they look to books to pin hope onto. To me
the main mode of cli-fi is to engage people with a real climate change
message, how can cli-fi authors do this whilst also offering hope?
DB
There are two useful terms for this memorialization of the world as we
know it, solastalgia, distress over the loss of our homes due to
droughts and floods and hurricanes and summer heat waves and wildfires
...and speciestalgia, the distress we feel over the loss of so many some
species in the past and in the present. As for whether Cli-fi novels
should unleash terrifying dystopian visions or offer promises of hope
and optimism in the face of climate change issues, I think we need both
kinds of visions and individual authors will create cli-fi based on
their own considered feelings. We need both. Cli-fi is an open book and
will remain so over the next 100 years.
You can follow Dan Bloom and all things cli-fi at @do_you_cli_fi_ and at
http://cli-fi.net/
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/literature-and-science/blog/ecologyandenvironment/danbloom/
*This Day in Climate History - November 20, 2008
<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2008/11/nbc_fires_twc_environmental_un.html>
- from D.R. Tucker*
November 20, 2008: The Weather Channel cancels the climate-change series
"Forecast Earth."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2008/11/nbc_fires_twc_environmental_un.html
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/11/22/203375/nbc-nixes-tvs-only-climate-show-during-green-week/
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