[TheClimate.Vote] September 28, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Sep 28 11:30:39 EDT 2018
/September 28, 2018/
[Skeetzilla]
*"A bad science fiction movie": Large, aggressive mosquitoes swarm N.C.
city after Florence
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hurricane-florence-aftermath-north-carolina-flooding-large-aggressive-mosquitoes-2018-09-27/>*
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- A North Carolina city dealing with fallout from
Hurricane Florence has been swarmed by aggressive mosquitoes nearly
three times larger than regular mosquitoes. One resident, Robert
Phillips, describes their rise as "a bad science fiction movie."
North Carolina State University entomology professor Michael Reiskind
told The Fayetteville Observer that Florence's floodwater has caused
eggs for mosquito species such as the Psorophora ciliata to hatch. These
mosquitoes, often called "gallinippers," are known for their painful
bite and often lay eggs in low-lying damp areas.
The eggs lie dormant in dry weather and hatch as adults following heavy
rains. Reiskind said the state has 61 mosquito species, and "when the
flood comes, we get many, many billions of them."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hurricane-florence-aftermath-north-carolina-flooding-large-aggressive-mosquitoes-2018-09-27/
- -- - -
[Keep a pet spider or learn to slap faster]
*Mosquitoes Will Rule the Earth as Climate Change Expands Disease
Vectors
<https://www.biospace.com/article/cp8r-mosquitoes-will-rule-the-earth-as-climate-change-expands-disease-vectors/>*
By Mark Terry - Published: Sep 26, 2018
Although many U.S. politicians insist on denying climate change, most
scientists worldwide are believers. And the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) even has a page describing concerns over
climate change and the likelihood it will increase the risk of
vector-borne diseases. Those include Lyme disease (increasing), West
Nile virus (increasing), Zika virus (increasing), and malaria (increasing).
And, in fact, given the flooding and destruction caused in the Carolinas
by Hurricane Florence, the CDC notes that mosquitoes and as a result,
mosquito-borne illnesses, often increase after a hurricane. Although
mosquitoes don't typically survive the high winds of a hurricane,
"Immediately following a hurricane, flooding occurs. Mosquito eggs laid
in the soil by floodwater mosquitoes during previous floods hatch. This
results in very large populations of floodwater mosquitoes."
Generally, these are "nuisance mosquitoes" that don't spread
illness-causing viruses. The disease-carrying types, however, usually
increase two weeks to two months after a hurricane.
- - - -
Bottom line? Politicians might deny climate change, but disease-carrying
insects and their pathogens aren't--they're exploiting it. There might
be a joke there about the difference between politicians and
disease-carrying parasites, but let's not go there.
https://www.biospace.com/article/cp8r-mosquitoes-will-rule-the-earth-as-climate-change-expands-disease-vectors/
[Peter Sinclair asks:]
*Dear Abbey: Should I Tell my Republican Friend about Climate Change?
<https://climatecrocks.com/2018/09/26/dear-abbey-should-i-tell-my-republican-friend-about-climate-change/>*
If someone is tipsy and about to step in a hole, should you tell them?
Common courtesy would say yes, but what if the person is an angry,
delusional, abusive drunk?
https://climatecrocks.com/2018/09/26/dear-abbey-should-i-tell-my-republican-friend-about-climate-change/
[Why not?]
*Should I tell my Republican friend that her Florida mansion is doomed
by sea-level rise?
<https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/09/advice-should-i-warn-my-friend-about-rising-sea-levels/>*
*In this new advice column*, climate journalist Sara Peach answers your
questions about how climate change could affect you and the people you love.
Dear Sara,
My friend is a Republican who owns a very expensive mansion on Fisher
Island in Miami. I'm fairly sure my friend believes that climate change
is real but does not know how serious the situation may get within her
or her children's lifetimes. What year will I tell her is the last I'll
be able to visit her there, because it will be underwater? How many
years ahead of that will she need to sell it before it'll be rendered
worthless? I'm thinking of getting her a garden gnome wearing a snorkel.
– Climate Concerned in New York City
Let's begin with the facts, which are straightforward. Sea-level rise is
not just a problem for 50 or 100 years from now. It's already begun.
Today, under certain conditions – when there's an unusually high tide,
for example – water spills into basements and low-lying streets across
South Florida.
The problem will get worse. Another 6 to 10 inches of sea-level rise is
expected in South Florida by 2030, and perhaps more than two feet by the
time today's high-school seniors turn 60. In response, Miami Beach, a
wealthy community on a barrier island just north of your friend's home
on Fisher Island, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elevate
roads, raise seawalls, and install pumps to suck the water away.
But the construction projects bring their own problems: "Constant
detours, constant dust, constant pounding," said Dan Kipnis, a retired
fishing captain and Miami Beach native, when I visited him last
November. "It makes me grumpy and agitated and angry, and sometimes I
say or do things that I probably shouldn't."
Kipnis told me he's decided to sell his house and leave the area rather
than put up with ever-worsening flooding and construction. (As of this
writing, his home has been on the market for more than two years.)
All of this is to say that it's impossible to know precisely when, if
ever, your friend's home will be fully submerged. But if she had sent me
this question, I would tell her that so-called "nuisance" flooding is
the more serious near-term threat to many coastal homes.
Within the next 30 years -- that is to say, during the term of a new
30-year mortgage, more than 300,000 properties in the contiguous U.S.
could be at risk of chronic, disruptive flooding, according to the Union
of Concerned Scientists. And long before real estate actually goes
underwater, people will start selling, because their quality of life
will be degraded. In fact, one recent analysis found that sea-level rise
has already begun to affect coastal real-estate markets, shaving off
more than $7 billion in property values in Florida, Georgia, Virginia,
and the Carolinas. "If those homes become uninsurable and unmarketable,
the values of the homes will plummet, perhaps to zero," warned mortgage
giant Freddie Mac. "Unlike the recent experience, homeowners will have
no expectation that the values of their homes will ever recover."
So how might you talk about all of this with your friend? This is the
hard part. If you grew up in the U.S., you may have been taught to avoid
talking about gloomy social problems, especially with those with whom
you might disagree. You've also been trained to stay out of other
people's business – and in many ways, your friend's choices about where
to live and how to manage her property are fundamentally Not Your Business.
And yet.
Many of us are quietly worrying but politely not talking about a crisis
unlike any humanity has yet faced. CLICK TO TWEET
All of this staying-out-of-others'-business contributes to an ugly
phenomenon called the climate change "spiral of silence," identified by
my colleagues at the Yale Program on Climate Communication. Briefly:
Climate change is personally important to most Americans, but we rarely
talk about it with our friends or family. Because we're not talking
about it, those around us also shy away from the subject. The result is
that many of us are quietly worrying but politely not talking about a
crisis unlike any humanity has yet faced.
For that reason, my advice is to start talking.
*Suggestions*
- I keep daydreaming about what would happen if you scheduled a
visit to your friend to coincide with unusually high tides and
street flooding -- and used that as a conversation starter. (A good
bet would be to visit on the date of the full moon in September or
October, when the alignment of the sun, the Earth, and the moon give
an extra tug to the tides.)
- However, you'll probably get better results if you avoid a single
blow-out conversation in which you present your friend with a garden
gnome sporting a snorkel and then confront/overwhelm her with all of
the facts.
- Instead, try chatting about sea-level rise in small doses that fit
within the natural flow of your relationship.
- Ask questions. Has she noticed any flooding? How does that affect
her day-to-day life? What does she think she might do if the
flooding gets worse in the future?
- Ideally, your discussions will shift into a mode in which she
starts asking you questions. What you're aiming for is conversation
in which both of you are curious about what the other has to say,
and neither of you is lecturing -- in other words, a normal
conversation between two humans who like each other.
You may find that your friend responds defensively. If she shuts down
your attempts at conversation, take comfort in the fact that ultimately,
she is in charge of her house and her life. And assuming that not all of
her equity is tied up in her expensive mansion, she will have the
resources to take care of herself – unlike many low-income residents of
South Florida and other coastal communities worldwide.
Wondering how climate change could affect you or your loved ones? Send
your questions to sara at yaleclimateconnections.org.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/09/advice-should-i-warn-my-friend-about-rising-sea-levels/
[It's not the fault of giant cows]
*There's So Much Methane in This Arctic Lake That You Can Light the Air
on Fire <https://www.livescience.com/63688-methane-lake-farts-fire.html>*
By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer - September 27, 2018
All day long, the surface of Esieh Lake in northern Alaska shudders with
indigestion. This Arctic lake never fully freezes. Stand next to it, and
you'll hear it hiss. Watch it, and you'll see it boil with ancient,
bubbling gas. Light a fire over it, and the lake will fart a tower of
flame higher than your head.
That's exactly what Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, did in a popular YouTube video
from 2010. Walter Anthony has been studying Esieh Lake for the better
part of a decade (she also named it). Now, according to a profile
written by Chris Mooney for The Washington Post, sheknows the causeof
the lake's odd behavior. The culprit is a constant seep of the
greenhouse gas methane --a lot of methane -- spilling out of an ancient
reservoir of permafrost (or permanently frozen ground) deep below the
tundra.
Thanks to rising global temperatures, that permafrost is thawing, Walter
Anthony said, and it's carving a hole through the bottom of the lake.
While most of Esieh Lake has an average depth of about 3 feet (1 meter),
the sections where the biggest methane bubbles are seeping out plunge
down to up to 50 feet (15 m).
From these holes in the bottom of the lake, huge amounts of methane
come gushing out -- more than 2 tons of gas every day, according to one
of Walter Anthony's colleagues -- an amount that's equivalent to the
emissions of about 6,000 dairy cows (cow farts are one of the world's
largest methane sources).
Thawing Arctic permafrost is a huge concern for climate scientists.
Within these frozen sheets of past plant life, thousands of years of
greenhouse gases are thought to lie trapped. As global temperatures rise
and permafrost begins to melt, that gas is slowly released into the
atmosphere. Researchers' greatest fear is that this Arctic off-gassing
will start a feedback loop: The more greenhouse gases released by
permafrost today, the higher temperatures will climb and the more gases
will be released tomorrow.
"These lakes speed up permafrost thaw," Walter Anthony told The
Washington Post. "It's an acceleration."
While many climate models focus on the effects of carbon dioxide being
released from thawing permafrost, methane emissions in lakes like Esieh
have been largely overlooked until very recently. In a study of several
underground Arctic lakes published Aug. 15 in the journal Nature
Communications, Walter Anthony and her colleagues estimated that
methane-seeping lakes could double previous estimates of
permafrost-caused warming.
According to a 2014 study led by the National Snow and Ice Data Center
in Colorado, carbon released from thawing permafrost could increase
global warming by about 8 percent, contributing about 0.6 degrees
Fahrenheit (0.3 degrees Celsius) to the predicted increase of 7 to 9
degrees F (4 to 5 degrees C) by the year 2100. If Arctic methane
emissions are as serious as Walter Anthony and her colleagues predict,
that increase in temperature could come much, much sooner.
https://www.livescience.com/63688-methane-lake-farts-fire.html
[one month?]
*Amazon deforestation in Brazil up 199 percent in August 2018
<http://imazon.org.br/publicacoes/boletim-do-desmatamento-da-amazonia-legal-agosto-2018-sad/>*
By Stefania Costa
24 September 2018
(Imazon) – In August 2018, SAD detected 545 square kilometers of
deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, an increase of 199% in relation
to August 2017, when deforestation totaled 182 square kilometers. In
August 2018, deforestation occurred in Pará (37%), Mato Grosso (20%),
Amazonas (19%), Rondônia (16%), Acre (7%), Roraima (1%) and Tocantins
%). The degraded forests in the Legal Amazon totaled 118 square
kilometers in August 2018, presenting a reduction of 70% compared to
August 2017, when the detected forest degradation totaled 392 square
kilometers. In August 2018, degradation was detected in the states of
Mato Grosso (89%), Pará (10%) and Rondônia (1%).
http://imazon.org.br/publicacoes/boletim-do-desmatamento-da-amazonia-legal-agosto-2018-sad/
[better jerky]
*In a Country So Dry Even Cows Take Showers, Climate Change Gets Ignored
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-26/even-in-dry-australia-politics-mean-climate-change-gets-ignored>*
Australia's government is as far from a plan of action as it's ever been.
From cooling showers for cows to airport runways designed for higher
sea levels, businesses and parts of Australia's A$2.7 trillion ($2
trillion) pension industry are starting to find ways to live with rising
temperatures.
In the world's driest inhabited continent, enduring a devastating
drought that arrived in mid-winter, private action to prepare for
climate change contrasts with years of division on energy and
environmental policies. Australia's latest climate casualties are its
farmers, who are being forced to slaughter livestock and watch crops
wither amid one of the worst droughts on record...
- - - -
"It's akin to having one's fingers crossed and head buried in the sand."
For Australia's pension funds, the lack of certainty surrounding
climate policy is a problem because they often need to plan decades
ahead. With infrastructure assets in particular, which investors may
wish to hold indefinitely, ensuring they'll still be operational and
profitable in a changed climate is vital.
"Climate change is here and the impacts are being felt," said Emma
Herd, chief executive officer of the Investor Group on Climate
Change, whose members control about A$2 trillion in investments.
"Large sections of the private sector are moving in concert with
global change and not being driven by domestic regulatory pressures."
- - -
"All our decisions have a long-term aspect to them, otherwise it's not
worth investing the money," she says. How the climate will look in a
decade or more "is always in the back of your mind."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-26/even-in-dry-australia-politics-mean-climate-change-gets-ignored
[willful ignorance not allowed]
*'Mud and Confusion': Oil and Gas Industry Goes On Defense as Studies
Show Offshore Exploration Could Kill Zooplankton
<https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/09/25/oil-gas-industry-seismic-survey-offshore-exploration-kill-zooplankton>*
Graham Readfearn - September 25, 2018
"We knew it was going to cause a stir," said Australian marine scientist
Dr. Robert McCauley.
McCauley was referring to the results of an experiment testing the
impacts of a common oil and gas industry technique in waters off
southern Australia, which were reported in a scientific paper in June 2017.
The world's powerful offshore oil and gas industry has used seismic
surveys for decades as the primary way to locate fossil fuels under the
ocean floor.
*Impacts of Seismic Surveys*
Seismic surveys involve an underwater air gun pulled behind a boat and
fired at intervals, and as the shock waves bounce off the sea floor and
return to sensors, they help reveal where oil and gas might be.
McCauley, an associate professor at Curtin University in Western
Australia, and his colleagues wanted to know what these seismic surveys
did to zooplankton -- an organism at the base of the marine food web.
According to their results, published in the Nature journal Ecology and
Evolution, there was a two to three-fold increase in the number of dead
zooplankton at a distance of at least 1.2 kilomenters (about
three-quarters of a mile) from the air gun after the blasts. That is
much farther than previous reports of impacts out to only 10 meters or
so (roughly 33 feet).
- - - - -
Commercial fishers in Australia's state of Victoria and Tasmania are
also concerned that planned seismic surveys could impact their lobster,
abalone, scallop, and crab industries.
In a response to the concerns in North Carolina, the American Petroleum
Institute (API) and the International Association of Geophysical
Contractors (IAGC) wrote to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service
and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, saying the zooplankton
results were "of questionable scientific merit."
The letter, signed by IAGC president and API policy advisor Andy
Radford, claimed that McCauley and Semmens had "concurred with many of
the shortcomings" which the industry groups' unnamed reviewers had
identified with the zooplankton study.
But McCauley and Semmens have strongly rejected this version of events,
saying they had only agreed their work needed replicating by other
researchers -- a point made in the original research paper.
- - - -
She added: "While we found the study interesting and worthy of
additional research, we remain troubled by its small sample sizes, the
large day-to-day variability in both the baseline and experimental data,
and the large number of speculative conclusions that appear to be
inconsistent with the data collected over a two-day period."
"As a result, both statistically and methodologically, we stand by our
initial assertion that this project falls short of what would be needed
to provide a convincing case for adverse effects from geophysical survey
operations."
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/09/25/oil-gas-industry-seismic-survey-offshore-exploration-kill-zooplankton
[but climate is NOT a fiction event]
CliFi – A new way to talk about climate change
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/oct/18/clifi-a-new-way-to-talk-about-climate-change>
If you're not familiar with the new genre of climate fiction, you might
be soon.
John Abraham
Wed 18 Oct 2017 06.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.37 EST
Cli-Fi refers to "climate fiction;" it is a term coined by journalist
Dan Bloom. These are fictional books that somehow or someway bring real
climate change science to the reader. What is really interesting is that
Cli-Fi books often present real science in a credible way. They become
fun teaching tools. There are some really well known authors such as
Paolo Bacigalupi and Margaret Atwood among others. A list of other
candidate Cli-Fi novels was provided by Sarah Holding in the Guardian.
What makes a Cli-Fi novel good? Well in my opinion, it has to have some
real science in it. And it has to get the science right. Second, it has
to be fun to read. When done correctly, Cli-Fi can connect people to
their world; it can help us understand what future climate may be like,
or what current climate effects are.
As I write this, we are getting a steady stream of stories out of Puerto
Rico the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria. It is hard to imagine
the devastation, what life is like without electricity, food, or water.
What is life like on an island of 3 million people, each fending for
themselves, just trying to survive.
Another thing that is hard to imagine is the future. What will the world
be like decades from now when Earth temperatures have continued to rise?
What will agriculture be like? What will coastal communities be like?
What will international relations and armed conflict be like?
It is also hard to imagine what living a subsistence agriculture life is
like, today. What happens to lives and communities when the rains
change, or don't come at all? What would that world look like?
Cli-Fi stories are vehicles that can help us imagine. The authors get us
to think about these what ifs – these future Earths. Cli-Fi novels (and
movies for that matter) can make experiences far more real than endless
graphs or plots of temperature variations. And that, perhaps, is the
most important contribution Cli-Fi can make to the discussion of climate
change in our everyday lives. These authors get us to imagine what
experiences are or would be like.
One recent example of Cli-Fi literature is South Pole Station
<https://www.amazon.com/South-Pole-Station-Ashley-Shelby/dp/1250112826>
by Ashley Shelby. In this book we follow an artist, Cooper Gosling, who
is traveling to a research location on Antarctica to create paintings.
Yes, an artist is sent to live with researchers and crew – with funding
from the National Science Foundation. After arriving at the South Pole,
Cooper has to become acquainted with the strange social system that
exists there. Ashley writes the book in such a way that you actually
feel you are huddled in the cold with her and her co-workers.
Cooper doesn't uplift her life to travel to the South Pole on a whim. It
is an outcome of a family tragedy and a history that involves
romanticized stories of adventure to this remote place. While Cooper is
stationed at the pole, she hears news that a radical scientist is
coming. This scientist claims that climate change is a hoax – and his
presence further upsets the delicate social balance that exists at the
research location.
You see the expected reaction of the regular scientists when this
climate denier arrives to perform his research. There is backstabbing
and sabotage where in the end we find Copper helping this
climate-denying scientist carry out an experiment. The experiment goes
awry and there are repercussions all the way back to the US mainland,
and the halls of Congress.
I liked this book because I don't like fiction. That is, I find it
really hard to get into fictional books because my mind always runs back
to science, or my email, or papers to grade, or kids' soccer practices
to get to. I never feel like I have time to just read for fun. But this
book was really engaging. It was the first fictional book in a decade
that I didn't want to put down.
It is funny with really quick-witted humor that made me laugh. At the
same time, I was impressed by how I felt like I was there – working
amongst the staff and scientists. I enjoyed how Ashely weaved in threads
of real and accurate science. And this, perhaps, is what makes the
Cli-Fi genre so important. We can unintentionally learn real science.
Ashley's book is at the edge of this genre. It is not "dystopian" and it
is not about a post-apocalyptic world resulting from climate change. It
is topical and, though fiction, is as present-day as a news headline.
This book is about what people, dedicated to facts, are really doing
today. It doesn't seem futuristic. It seems like we are at a point when
a bunch of scientists and friends of facts could take over a research
station and say, "Stop the madness!"
Salman Rushdie recently said that in the present day the country is so
filled with lies and fantasy and fiction surrounding the truth, that it
might require the fiction writer to plainly lay out what is reality and
what is not. I think Ashley's book fits that notion.
So, take a look at this new (newish?) form of literature. Particularly
if you want a break from the usual genres. If you find something you
like that I didn't mention, please send it to me.
[Hidden Brain on NPR audio 35 mins - I listened twice]
*The Cassandra Curse: Why We Heed Some Warnings, And Ignore Others
<https://www.npr.org/2018/09/17/648781756/the-cassandra-curse-why-we-heed-some-warnings-and-ignore-others>*
SHANKAR VEDANTAM - September 17, 2018
After a disaster happens, we want to know, could something have been
done to avoid it? Did anyone see this coming?
Many times, the answer is yes. There was a person -- or many people --
who spotted a looming crisis and tried to warn those in power. So why
didn't the warnings lead to action?
This week on Hidden Brain, we look into the psychology of warnings.
We'll turn to an unusual source -- an ancient myth about the cursed
prophet Cassandra -- to understand why some warnings fail. We'll travel
40 feet below the ground to talk to a modern-day Cassandra, and we'll
speak with a government official who managed to get his warnings heard.
There's also a gory (and fictional) murder plot, and even some ABBA.
Additional Resources:
Christoph Meyer and Florian Otto,"*How to Warn: 'Outside-in
Warnings' of Western Governments about Violent Conflict and Mass
Atrocities,
<https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/54917301/Meyer_Otto_How_to_warn_MWC_accepted_final_edits.pdf>*"
Media, War & Conflict
Andrew Natsios, Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sudan-south-sudan-and-darfur-9780199764198?cc=us&lang=en&>
Translations of Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Euripides' Trojan Women
inThe Greek Plays
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/216216/the-greek-plays-by-new-translations-edited-by-mary-lefkowitz-and-james-romm/9780812983098/>
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer
Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu, Laura Kwerel, and Camila
Vargas Restrepo. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also
follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.
Transcript of the Show
<https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=648781756>
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=648781756
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/17/648781756/the-cassandra-curse-why-we-heed-some-warnings-and-ignore-others
[Major legal strategy shift]
*Trial Will Test New Weapon Against Climate Change: Necessity Defense
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/09/25/necessity-defense-valve-turners-climate/>*
By Seamus McGraw
No one--least of all the defendants--disputes the facts of the case
against four people known as valve-turners: activists who trespassed on
private property to shut down an oil pipeline in 2016. As their
otherwise straightforward case goes to trial in October, it's their
defense that has everyone's attention.
It was a cool, gray and wet October morning two years ago, when four
people armed with a bolt cutter, cell phones, a video recorder and a
mission, slipped onto a piece of property in the sleepy, conservative
western Minnesota community of Leonard. Through it ran a pipeline owned
by the Canadian company Enbridge Energy, which carries tar sands oil
from Alberta.
Part of a multi-state protest in 2016 dubbed #Shutitdown, their goal was
straightforward: to force Enbridge to shut down the pipeline, which the
activists viewed as a serious and imminent threat to the global
environment. If the company refused to do so, the activists would turn
the valves themselves. Enbridge did stop the flow safely, until the
trespassers were arrested.
Annette Klapstein and Emily Johnson were both charged with multiple
felonies and could face up to 10 years in prison. Videographer Steve
Liptay and Benjamin Joldersma, who was on hand to lend support, are both
facing misdemeanor charges.
Their defense is that their crime was part of preventing a greater harm:
climate change. It's called the necessity defense and when the judge in
archly conservative and rural Clearwater County ruled last year (and was
upheld by an appeals court in August) that the defendants could use it
in this trial, it threw an entirely new wrinkle into the battle to force
climate action through the courts.
That battle has gathered steam in the past two years on multiple fronts,
with a landmark youth-led suit, Juliana v. United States, also headed to
trial in October, with 21 young people arguing the federal government is
robbing them of a safe climate and livable future. A wave of communities
and one state attorney general have begun to sue the fossil fuel
industry to pay for the spiraling costs of climate impacts. And two
states, New York and Massachusetts, are using consumer and investor
protection statutes to investigate whether the biggest of the U.S. oil
giants, Exxon, is guilty of fraud.
The Minnesota trial could add another weapon in that arsenal if 12
jurors rule that the tar sands oil flowing through that pipeline posed
such a critical and immediate threat to the climate that the activists
were justified in their dramatic action to shut it down.
This would be no small feat. The 12 jurors are from a county that in
2016 voted 69.2 percent for a presidential candidate who claims climate
change is a hoax.
But the very fact that the appeals court has allowed the defense to be
used at all is a victory, according to the valve turners' defenders.
Ever since six Greenpeace activists, charged with shutting down a
coal-fired power plant in Great Britain, successfully used a version of
it and were acquitted in 2008, activists in the United States and
elsewhere have been looking for opportunities to use the defense in
related cases.
In Minnesota, they're getting their chance.
The idea is to turn the courtroom into a classroom, said William
Quigley, a Loyola University law professor who has written extensively
on the necessity defense and who filed an amicus brief in support of the
Civil Liberties Defense Center's bid to use it in Clearwater County.
Quigley said in the brief that lawyers will place every bit as much
emphasis on hashing out the critical issue as they do on winning acquittal.
"Nonviolent civil disobedience is part of the American democratic
tradition," he wrote in the brief. "The four individuals named above
stand in the shoes of the American freedom fighters, the abolitionists,
the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners of the 1960s, and the
antiwar protesters that followed. Criminal trials in which protesters
have explained and argued their views are an integral part of that
tradition. The use of the necessity defense in this case is not only
doctrinally appropriate but strengthens the constitutional bedrock on
which our legal system rests. That bedrock includes the right to trial
by jury, freedom of expression and debate, and a natural environment
capable of providing for human needs."
Quigley argues that even if the defendants are convicted, there is
triumph in having put climate change itself on trial.
Carroll Muffett, president and chief executive of the Washington,
D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law agrees. "In the
face of inertia in policy making --particularly at the U.S. national
level-- people are finding…that we are failing to respond to the climate
threat at anything approaching the speed and scale that we have to do that.
"This is what is pushing individuals toward ever stronger action,
including putting themselves on the line, to try to stop climate
change," he said. "If you have tried to change the law, if you've
tried…to prevent harm through every legal means, if you've opposed
permits, if you've filed suits, if you have thoughtfully intervened in
the political process and harm is still occurring… still imminent, then
that is precisely when taking….actions that violate a law to avoid a
larger harm, that's when the necessity defense is relevant."
"The fact that people are saying…if policy makers won't stop it then we
will put ourselves out there, and we will put ourselves in harm's way to
do so, is a really natural evolution in the face of a pressing crisis,"
Muffett said. "I think…courts are grappling with this increasingly, and
I think…in a number of cases, judges have recognized that these
realities may be sufficiently pressing that the necessity defense has a
legal role to play."
Expert witnesses expected to testify in Minnesota include Dr. James
Hansen, the former NASA scientist whose landmark Congressional testimony
about climate change in 1988 brought the issue to the American public,
and climate activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben.
The defendants and their supporters lauded the appeals court ruling that
cleared the way for this defense in court.
"The Minnesota Court of Appeals has upheld our right to present a full
defense to a Minnesota jury, including the facts of the ongoing climate
catastrophe caused largely by the fossil fuel industry," said Klapstein,
herself a retired attorney. "I believe that many judges are aware that
our political system has proven itself disastrously unwilling to deal
with the catastrophic crisis of climate change, which leaves as our only
recourse the actions of ordinary citizens like ourselves and the courts
and juries of our peers that stand in judgments of those actions."
The valve turners are being represented by lawyers from the the Civil
Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), a Seattle-based legal advocacy group.
Lauren Regan, the group's lead attorney, said it tried to use the
necessity defense in similar cases over the last few years in the states
of Washington, North Dakota and Montana, but the courts blocked it. In
each of those cases, however, the CDLC--working pro bono in rural
counties every bit as conservative as Clearwater--was able to work in
enough evidence about the threat of climate change and its clients'
motives to win the sympathy of the juries, if not outright acquittals.
In one of those cases--against Ken Ward, who was charged with sabotage
in Washington in a #shutitdown action on the same day-- the first trial
ended in a hung jury and the second ended with an acquittal on the most
serious offense and a conviction, instead, of second-degree burglary.
Ward was sentenced in June 2017 to two days in jail--which he had
already served while awaiting trial--and 240 hours of community service.
"All of those are on appeal right now," Regan said of that case and the
others.
More important, she said, in the cases, jurors expressed a certain
respect for the defendants' principles. "In all three other
valve-turner trials, in rural Washington and rural Montana and rural
North Dakota, every single jury pool started off with jurors who would
literally say…climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese. But
at the end of the trials, when the judges gave us permission to go talk
with the jurors, they were shaking our clients' hands and thanking us
for educating them about climate change.
"I think the courtroom is a fairly intimate setting and I think having
our clients take the stand and having a fairly direct conversation with
12 strangers…and especially in this case being able to present expert
testimony and have some of the top brains working on these issues being
able to sit down and explain things to jurors, I think is an incredibly
effective way to reach into audiences and communities that we might not
otherwise have access to."
Using the courtroom as a forum for educating the public on the risks of
climate change is certainly one of the principal objectives of the
strategy, said Quigley. "These are arguments that the prosecutor always
wants to exclude because the people who have the chance to make these
arguments often win their cases," Quigley said, "If it's just, 'did you
trespass onto somebody else's property and use a wrench on their stuff?'
well, a jury's gonna say, 'yeah, that's a crime.'
"But if the defendants can put on somebody from the local university to
say, 'look, let me tell you what this pipeline is doing to our
environment,' then this is a chance to send a message that there are
some things that are legal but they're not right."
Still, Quigley and other supporters acknowledged that the defendants
would have a tough row to hoe to convince a jury that the peril of
climate change--which plays out over decades--meets the law's definition
of imminent danger. As Jordan Kushner, the Minnesota attorney who
co-authored the amicus brief with Quigley, put it, "You can't say 'the
world is going to be destroyed in 100 years.' That's not going to cut it.'
But others say there is enough flexibility in the language of the
Minnesota law for the valve turners to work with. Michael Noble, who
heads Fresh Energy, a Minnesota organization that advocates for
renewable energy policy, and has been monitoring the case closely, said
the word imminent "doesn't necessarily mean that the ax murderer is
chopping down your door with an ax and you're on the other side of the
door. That's not the only definition of the word imminent."
Indeed, Regan said she was confident that she could provide evidence not
just that the climate peril posed by the tar sands oil in the Enbridge
pipeline was immediate, but that the specific actions taken by the valve
turners--not just in Minnesota but in all the states where the activists
acted--would have been a reasonable and effective response. "I'm sure
you're aware that the five pipelines that were shut down were all
pipelines carrying tar sands into the United States," she said. "If all
of that tar sands flow had actually stopped and the pipeline companies
had not been permitted to restart those pipelines, then the action would
have achieved the 15 percent reduction in carbon emissions that is
required according to scientists in order to regain control of the
out-of-control spiral that's currently going on in regards to carbon
emissions."
Whether that argument is compelling enough to persuade a jury in a
conservative county remains an open question. Regan said she is
optimistic. So is Kushner. Moderately. While the necessity defense might
find a more receptive audience in Hennepin or Ramsey counties in the
Minneapolis-St. Paul region, it could still work in Clearwater.
"Sometimes," Kushner said, "you get receptive views from people that you
wouldn't expect.",,
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/09/25/necessity-defense-valve-turners-climate/
TUE SEP 25, 2018 / 4:34 AM EDT
*Love in the time of climate change: Indian film with a new take on
romance <https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL8N1WA33F>*
Annie Banerji, Thomson Reuters Foundation
BHUBANESWAR, India Sept 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Eschewing
the typical Bollywood storyline of young lovers facing family
opposition, an upcoming Indian film instead features a couple battling
climate change in order to be together.
"Kokoli", which is the name of the female protagonist and also a type of
fish, tells a story of a fishing community facing the loss of
livelihoods and land as sea levels rise in the eastern state of Odisha.
It will be released in November.
The Oriya-language film centres on Kokoli and her boyfriend, who sets
out to build a wall to keep towering waves from destroying and uprooting
his village - a task he must succeed at in order to win her mother's
approval.
"Fishing is the only livelihood for them and the only skill they know.
They are victims of climate change," filmmaker Snehasis Das told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Simultaneously, I focus on how love - a relationship - can be disturbed
due to calamities," said the 43-year-old. "It is a lot about how they
adapt to love and climate change. Their future hinges on adaptation."
With a nearly 500 km (300 mile) coastline, Odisha is home to many
coastal communities that depend on the sea.
The state is also one of India's most vulnerable to the effects of
global warming, hit by rising sea levels, cyclones and floods, with vast
stretches of the shoreline being lost to erosion.
In June, the state government warned in a report that fishermen's
catches could plummet with rising temperatures.
India faces the most severe threat from climate change, followed by
Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, HSBC showed in a March survey
of 67 countries.
Changing weather, along with more frequent droughts and heat waves, will
hurt agricultural output and food security in developing nations such as
India, according to studies by HSBC, the World Bank and the World Health
Organization.
Climate change will also lead to water shortages and outbreaks of water
and mosquito-borne diseases such as diarrhea and malaria, according to
their research.
"The effects (of climate change) creep up on you and many of these
communities know there is something brewing - more tides, water reaching
their huts - but don't see any immediate danger," said Das.
"But they have to understand that they must start adapting now, before
it is too late, which is something I have touched upon in my film."
CHANGE MAKERS
In order to appeal to a wide audience, Das also threw a song sequence
into the mix, like Bollywood does, but he said the main aim is to get a
message across to people.
"A good way to do this is through a human angle that says, 'If this is
happening to them, it can happen to you too,' - to make it relatable.
And what is better than a love story? Everybody likes a good love story."
He urged Bollywood - the world's largest film industry - to steer away
from glitz and glamour and make some movies about climate change, even
if the prospects of producing blockbusters about such subjects are slim.
"Bollywood has the power to reach the masses so easily. And it can be
challenging weaving in a social message in a commercial film, but it can
be done," said Das, who has made about 15 documentaries and several
music videos on the topic.
More than anyone else, Das hopes his film reaches the country's youth
who he says are "future change makers".
"This problem is only going to snowball and the younger generation can
help, perhaps by dedicating some of their work to this cause and create
awareness," he said.
"They are my target audience." (Reporting by Annie Banerji
@anniebanerji, Editing by Jared Ferrie ; Please credit the Thomson
Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers
humanitarian issues, conflicts, land and property rights, modern slavery
and human trafficking, gender equality, climate change and resilience.
Visit news.trust.org to see more stories)
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL8N1WA33F
*This Day in Climate History - September 28, 2007
<http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2007/09/28/201917/bush-climate-speech-follows-luntz-playbook-technology-technology-technology-blah-blah-blah/>
- from D.R. Tucker*
September 28, 2007: President George W. Bush speaks at a "conference" on
climate change in Washington. The speech and the "conference" are widely
viewed as political efforts to obscure the Bush administration's overall
lack of interest in taking serious steps to reduce carbon pollution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/americas/28iht-28climatesub.7674315.html
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2007/09/28/201917/bush-climate-speech-follows-luntz-playbook-technology-technology-technology-blah-blah-blah/
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