[TheClimate.Vote] April 22, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Mon Apr 22 10:28:26 EDT 2019
/April 22, 2019/
[Effective activism]
*Extinction Rebellion: Climate protesters 'making a difference'*
A teenage climate change activist has told Extinction Rebellion
protesters in London they are "making a difference".
Greta Thunberg, 16, was greeted with chants of "we love you" as she took
to the stage in front of thousands of people at the rally in Marble Arch.
A protest organiser said they planned "a week of activities" including a
bid to prevent MPs entering Parliament.
More than 950 people have been arrested during the climate change
protests and 40 people have been charged...
- - -
Since the group was set up last year, members have shut bridges, poured
buckets of fake blood outside Downing Street, blockaded the BBC and
stripped semi-naked in Parliament.
It has three core demands: for the government to "tell the truth about
climate change"; to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025; and to
create a citizens' assembly to oversee progress.
Controversially, the group is trying to get as many people arrested as
possible.
But critics say they cause unnecessary disruption and waste police time
when forces are already overstretched.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48003955
- - -
[video Greta speaks to crowds]
*Thousands Gather at Marble Arch to Hear Greta Thunberg - Extinction
Rebellion - Apr21st*
ExtinctionRebellion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QORjAX2Ttoo
Published on Apr 21, 2019
Greta Thunberg, 16, was greeted with chants of "we love you" as she took
to the stage in front of thousands of people at the rally in Marble
Arch. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48003955
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QORjAX2Ttoo
Rebroadcast of FB live from https://www.facebook.com/ExtinctionRebellion
- - -
[Activism, home page]
*XR - EXtinction Rebellion*
https://rebellion.earth/
- - -
[Youth May 24th ]
*UK Strike - #YouthStrike4Climate*
We are choosing to rise up and take direct action where older
generations have failed. We are already facing devastating and
irreversible impacts around the world. This is our final chance to fight
for our futures, and our ages will not be what stop us. On Friday 15th
of February, more than 10'000 students across the UK went on strike to
protest lack of government action to combat our climate crisis, and
50'000 participated on the 15th of March. Now we're doing it again: join
us on the 24 May to amplify our voices once again
https://ukscn.org/ys4c
[Just deserts]
*Trump buildings could be forced to go green under sweeping New York
City climate bill*
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-climate-change-trump-tower-and-other-buildings-could-go-green-under-new-york-city-climate-mobilization-act/
[NYT Opinion]
*Climate's Troubling Unknown Unknowns*
We can’t adapt to perils we can't foresee. So we need to cut greenhouse
gas emissions now...
- -
Without an aggressive policy commitment to mitigation by rapidly
reducing our carbon emissions, our grandchildren could be destined to
live in a world with nature's unknown unknowns around each year's turn.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/opinion/climate-change-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
[Great Mapping App]
*A dot for every vote.*
https://www.esri.com/en-us/maps-we-love/gallery/election-2016-dot-density
*- - -
**[STOP!] Algonquin Pipeline Expansion*
https://sape2016.org/
- - -
[NY State fossil fuel pipelines]*
**You Are Here!*
Welcome to the You Are Here Map that explores the fracking
infrastructure of our region and the communities affected by the
industry, and what communities are doing to defend their land, water,
air and democracy.
Why The Map:
The You Are Here Map makes the fracking infrastructure connections
visible since it is not available to the public in a comprehensive
manner, and works to connect people to grassroots groups fighting gas
infrastructure at the local level. It can also be used as an educational
tool for elected officials and community groups...
- -
In the chapters below, we will:
Introduce you to stories and photos of local regions
Show you how the pipelines are connected
Define the parts of fracking infrastructure
Engage you with maps that are fully interactive ...zoom, click and explore
Involve and invite you to add to the story
https://ft.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=278586b751454085a381b188d1cc80d0
[George Monbiot]
*No More Excuses*
Posted: 20 Apr 2019
*No one is coming to save us. Only rebellion will prevent an
environmental apocalypse*
By George Monbiot,
Had we put as much effort into preventing environmental catastrophe as
we've spent on making excuses for inaction, we would have solved it by
now. Everywhere I look, I see people engaged in furious attempts to fend
off the moral challenge it presents.
The commonest current excuse is this: "I bet those protesters have
phones/go on holiday/wear leather shoes." In other words, we won't
listen to anyone who is not living naked in a barrel, subsisting only on
murky water. Of course, if you are living naked in a barrel, we will
dismiss you too, because you're a hippie weirdo. Every messenger, and
every message they bear, is disqualified, on the grounds of either
impurity or purity.
As the environmental crisis accelerates, and as protest movements like
YouthStrike4Climate and Extinction Rebellion make it harder not to see
what we face, people discover more inventive means of shutting their
eyes and shedding responsibility. Underlying these excuses is a
deep-rooted belief that if we really are in trouble, someone somewhere
will come to our rescue: "they" won't let it happen. But there is no
they, just us.
The political class, as anyone who has followed its progress over the
past three years can surely now see, is chaotic, unwilling and, in
isolation, strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises,
let alone a vast existential predicament. Yet a widespread and wilful
naivity prevails: the belief that voting is the only political action
required to change a system. Unless it is accompanied by the
concentrated power of protest, articulating precise demands and creating
space in which new political factions can grow, voting, while essential,
remains a blunt and feeble instrument.
The media, with a few exceptions, is actively hostile. Even when
broadcasters cover these issues, they carefully avoid any mention of
power, talking about environmental collapse as if it is driven by
mysterious, passive forces, and proposing microscopic fixes for vast
structural problems. The BBC's Blue Planet Live series exemplified this
tendency. As TV comedy and drama have become ever more daring, factual
and current affairs programmes have become ever more timid. Truth now
has to be smuggled into our homes under the guise of entertainment.
Those who govern the nation and shape public discourse cannot be trusted
with the preservation of life on Earth. There is no benign authority
preserving us from harm. No one is coming to save us. None of us can
justifiably avoid the call to come together to save ourselves.
I see despair as another variety of disavowal. By throwing up our hands
about the calamities that could one day afflict us, we disguise and
distance them, converting concrete choices into indecipherable dread. We
might relieve ourselves of moral agency by claiming that it's already
too late to act, but in doing so we condemn other people to destitution
or death. Catastrophe afflicts people now, and, unlike those in the rich
world who can still afford to wallow in despair, they are forced to
respond in practical ways. In Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi,
devastated by Cyclone Idai, in Syria, Libya and Yemen, where climate
chaos has contributed to civil war, in Guatemala, Honduras and El
Salvador, where crop failure, drought and the collapse of fisheries have
driven people from their homes, despair is not an option. Our inaction
has forced them into action, as they respond to terrifying circumstances
caused primarily by the rich world's consumption. The Christians are
right: despair is a sin.
As the author Jeremy Lent points out in a recent essay, it is almost
certainly too late to save some of the world's great living wonders,
such as coral reefs and monarch butterflies. But, he argues, with every
increment of global heating, with every rise in material resource
consumption, we will have to accept still greater losses, many of which
can still be prevented through radical transformation.
Every nonlinear transformation in history has taken people by surprise.
As Alexei Yurchak explains in his book about the collapse of the Soviet
Union - Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - systems look
immutable until they suddenly disintegrate. As soon as they do, the
disintegration retrospectively looks inevitable. Our system -
characterised by perpetual economic growth on a planet that is not
growing - will inevitably implode. The only question is whether the
transformation is planned or unplanned. Our task is to ensure it is
planned, and fast. We need to conceive and build a new system, based on
the principle that every generation, everywhere has an equal right to
enjoy natural wealth.
This is less daunting than we might imagine. As Erica Chenoweth's
historical research reveals, for a peaceful mass movement to succeed, a
maximum of 3.5% of the population needs to mobilise. Humans are
ultra-social mammals, constantly if subliminally aware of shifting
social currents. Once we perceive the status quo has changed, we flip
suddenly from support for one state of being to support for another.
When a committed and vocal 3.5% unites behind the demand for a new
system, the social avalanche that follows becomes irresistible. Giving
up before we have reached this threshold is worse than despair: it is
defeatism.
Today, Extinction Rebellion takes to streets around the world in defence
of our life support systems. Through daring, disruptive, non-violent
action, it forces our environmental predicament onto the political
agenda. Who are these people? Another "they", who might rescue us from
our follies? The success of this mobilisation depends on us. It will
reach the critical threshold only if enough of us cast aside denial and
despair, and join this exuberant, proliferating movement. The time for
excuses is over. The struggle to overthrow our life-denying system has
begun.
- published in the Guardian 15th April 2019
[Nitrous Oxide is a bad chemical to put into the air. Worse than we
thought]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLopWeZVTg8
*Duh. Arctic Emissions of Nitrous Oxide GHG a Dozen Times Worse Than
Expected. OOPS. Part 1 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Apr 20, 2019
Surprise... Nitrous oxide emissions from our rapidly warming north are
up to 12-times higher than we previously thought, since thawing Arctic
permafrost is a huge source. The problem is: 1)the top 3 meters of
permafrost contains 73 billion tons of nitrogen; 2)as it thaws microbial
action releases bucket loads of N2O; and 3)N2O is a very powerful
Greenhouse Gas, with a Global Warming Potential about 300 times that of
CO2 (lifetime in atmosphere of 114 years). In this video I chat about
what this all means; in the next I show the science in plots and images
from the paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLopWeZVTg8
- - -
discussion
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/acp-19-4257-2019-discussion.html
paper https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/
*Permafrost nitrous oxide emissions observed on a landscape scale using
the airborne eddy-covariance method*
Jordan Wilkerson et al.
The microbial by-product nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas
and ozone depleting substance, has conventionally been assumed to have
minimal emissions in permafrost regions. This assumption has been
questioned by recent in situ studies which have demonstrated that some
geologic features in permafrost may, in fact, have elevated emissions
comparable to those of tropical soils. However, these recent studies,
along with every known in situ study focused on permafrost N2O fluxes,
have used chambers to examine small areas (<50 m2). In late August 2013,
we used the airborne eddy-covariance technique to make in situ N2O flux
measurements over the North Slope of Alaska from a low-flying aircraft
spanning a much larger area: around 310 km2. We observed large
variability of N2O fluxes with many areas exhibiting negligible
emissions. Still, the daily mean averaged over our flight campaign was
3.8 (2.2-4.7) mg N2O m−2 d−1 with the 90 % confidence interval shown in
parentheses. If these measurements are representative of the whole
month, then the permafrost areas we observed emitted a total of around
0.04-0.09 g m−2 for August, which is comparable to what is typically
assumed to be the upper limit of yearly emissions for these regions.
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 4257-4268,
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4257-2019, 2019...
N2O is the third most influential anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG)
behind CO2 and CH4. Inert in the lowest atmospheric layer, N2O
eventually rises into the stratosphere. There, photolysis and
electronically excited oxygen atoms (O(1D)) convert N2O to nitrogen
oxides that catalytically deplete ozone. N2O is currently the dominant
anthropogenically emitted ozone-depleting substance. It is expected to
remain so throughout the entire 21st century (Ravishankara et al.,
2009). Due to increased industrial processes and agricultural practices
that rely on heavy fertilization, N2O concentrations have been steadily
rising in the atmosphere (Park et al., 2012). With a global
temperature-change potential over a 100-year timescale (GTP100) of 296,
the climate system is more sensitive to changes in N2O concentrations
than to changes in either of its carbon-based GHG counterparts (IPCC,
2013)...
more at - https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/
- - -
[Nitrous Oxide greenhouse gas - part 2]
*Oops. Arctic Emissions of Nitrous Oxide GHG a Dozen Times Worse Than
Expected. Duh. Part 2 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Apr 20, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PolsVbyzvY
[From January 2018]
*Coming to Terms With Ecoanxiety*
Growing an awareness of climate change.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-me-in-we/201801/coming-terms-ecoanxiety
[with humor, ranting, sarcastic Aussie opinion]
*Exposing Government & Corporate Corruption*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByWfC0367AI
*Corruption & Climate (Australian Style)*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8juHVzrL3ag
GlobalClimateNews
Published on Apr 21, 2019
The Juice Media gives some solid satire on serious investigative
journalism. I approve.
Bringing you the worst atrocities imaginable...In the form of digestible
satire. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMXvhByOe5kQXjTE7-LFFIA
*This Day in Climate History - April 22, 1970 - from D.R. Tucker*
April 22, 1970: "NBC Nightly News" anchor Frank Blair, covering the
events of the first Earth Day, cites global warming as a concern.
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/icue/29901277
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