[TheClimate.Vote] August 12, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/August 12, 2019/

[ABC News interviews Al Gore]
*Climate change 'getting worse faster than we are mobilizing to solve 
it': Al Gore*
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/climate-change-worse-faster-mobilizing-solve-al-gore/story?id=64862944 



[Some relatively new science]
[Weather Channel says]
*Abundant Marine Bacteria Could Speed up Global Warming, Study Says*
By Jan Wesner Childs - weather.com
At a Glance

    The bacteria contains pigments called rhodopsins.
    Unlike algae, they don't pull carbon dioxide out of the air.
    Rhodopsins flourish in nutrient-poor oceans.

A flourishing type of marine bacteria could speed up global warming, a 
new study shows.
The bacteria contains pigments called rhodopsins, which absorb sunlight 
but, unlike algae, don't pull carbon dioxide out of the air. The study, 
published this week in the journal Science Advances, found that the 
bacteria were far more prevalent than thought.

Researchers also discovered that the bacteria congregate in areas where 
there are less nutrients, which means they are more prevalent in warmer 
waters where nutrients don't thrive.

That means that as the oceans warm, the bacteria could outcompete algae 
- which is key to capturing carbon dioxide - for room at the ocean's 
surface, according to the study.

"Rhodopsins appear to be more abundant in a nutrient-poor ocean, and in 
the future, the ocean will be more nutrient-poor as temperatures 
change," lead researcher Laura Gómez-Consarnau, a biology professor at 
the University of Southern California Dornsife College, said in a press 
release. "With fewer nutrients near the surface, algae will have limited 
photosynthesis and the rhodopsin process will be more abundant. We may 
have a shift in the future, which means the ocean won't be able to 
absorb as much carbon as it does today. More CO2 gas may remain in the 
atmosphere, and the planet may warm faster."

Rhodopsins were discovered 20 years ago, and previous studies have shown 
that they make up about 80 percent of the marine bacteria, according to 
the press release. This is the first study to measure how highly 
concentrated they are in the ocean and where they live.

The researchers took samples from waters as deep as 356 feet along a 
3,000-mile-long swath of the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean 
Sea. They found that rhodopsins were more prevalent than previously 
thought, especially in warmer, nutrient-poor waters, and discovered that 
they outperformed algae in capturing light.

The study says that computer modeling of climate change doesn't account 
for the microbial shift that could occur if rhodopsins continue to flourish.

"Oceans are important for climate change because they play a key role in 
the carbon cycle," Gómez-Consarnau said. "Understanding how that works, 
and the marine organisms involved, helps us refine our climate models to 
predict climate in the future."
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-08-marine-bacteria-global-warming
- - -
[study]
*Microbial rhodopsins are major contributors to the solar energy 
captured in the sea*
Abstract
All known phototrophic metabolisms on Earth rely on one of three 
categories of energy-converting pigments: chlorophyll-a (rarely -d), 
bacteriochlorophyll-a (rarely -b), and retinal, which is the chromophore 
in rhodopsins. While the significance of chlorophylls in solar energy 
capture has been studied for decades, the contribution of retinal-based 
phototrophy to this process remains largely unexplored. We report the 
first vertical distributions of the three energy-converting pigments 
measured along a contrasting nutrient gradient through the Mediterranean 
Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The highest rhodopsin concentrations were 
observed above the deep chlorophyll-a maxima, and their geographical 
distribution tended to be inversely related to that of chlorophyll-a. We 
further show that proton-pumping proteorhodopsins potentially absorb as 
much light energy as chlorophyll-a–based phototrophy and that this 
energy is sufficient to sustain bacterial basal metabolism. This 
suggests that proteorhodopsins are a major energy-transducing mechanism 
to harvest solar energy in the surface ocean.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaaw8855



[coming soon to a theater near you]
*Consuming the "Planet of the Humans:" The Most Important Documentary of 
the Century*
by MICHAEL DONNELLY
"Planet of the Humans" premiered at the gloriously community-restored 
State Theatre July 31st at the 15th Traverse City, MI Film Festival with 
three sold-out/standing ovation showings followed by Q & A's with the 
creators. "Planet" presents the underlying Ecosystem facts and then 
examines what we have been doing to address the issue and the lack of 
success. The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate 
foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why 
we are where we are.

The bottom line is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too 
much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are 
reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human 
footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any 
consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/09/consuming-the-planet-of-the-humans-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-century/
- -
*'Planet of the Humans,' Possibly Most Bracing Environmental Documentary 
Ever Made, Premieres at Traverse City Film Festival**
* 
https://www.nonfictionfilm.com/news/planet-of-the-humans-possibly-most-bracing-environmental-documentary-ever-made-premieres-at-traverse-city-film-festival

Director Jeff Gibbs argues we're heading toward 'total human apocalypse' 
and green energy is 'not going to save us, it's actually going to kill 
us faster'

Films about environmental issues have long been a staple of the 
documentary form, a genre that in recent years alone has brought us 
Before the Flood, Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral and, of course, An 
Inconvenient Truth. But those documentaries arguably pale in importance 
to Planet of the Humans, which just held its world premiere at the 
Traverse City Film Festival.

The film directed by Jeff Gibbs, produced by Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner and 
executive produced by Michael Moore, makes the deeply disturbing case 
that unless we reverse course, the human species faces ruin.

"The ultimate problem is that there are too many people consuming too 
much and we don't even have a word or a name for what this total human 
apocalypse is called," Gibbs told me during an interview in Traverse 
City. "What is the word for a single species that's overrun an entire 
planet and is causing mayhem in every direction?"
​
There is nothing you will ever have in your life that's not an 
extraction from the planet earth. And so we've all lost touch with that.
​
​--Planet of the Humans director Jeff Gibbs to Nonfictionfilm.com
Gibbs, an environmentalist, film producer and composer who has worked on 
several of Moore's documentaries, describes himself as "worried sick" 
about climate change. But unlike others who focus solely on the danger 
presented by global warming, Gibbs sees climate change as symptomatic of 
a larger problem - overpopulation and consumption of Earth's resources.

"Even if we don't save the planet," Gibbs comments, "I'd rather go down 
knowing the truth about the time we're in."...
The truth, Gibbs says, is that putative solutions to our global 
environmental dilemma, such as switching to renewable sources of energy, 
building more wind farms and electric cars, offer false hope.

"Everywhere I encountered green energy, it wasn't what it seemed," he 
says in voiceover in Planet of the Humans. "I was getting the uneasy 
feeling that green energy is not going to save us."

*WIND*
Take energy from wind. Gibbs points out that manufacturing wind turbines 
necessitates the use of fossil fuels and huge quantities of resources 
mined from the earth.

"In these wind turbines, there's up to 800 pounds of copper, there's 1 
to 2 tons of rare earth metals," he notes.

Not only that, but the lifespan of a typical wind turbine is only 20 
years, the film says. And making space for wind farms has meant laying 
waste to large tracts of land, and even, in some cases "mountaintop 
removal" (not unlike coal mining companies that have blown the top off 
of mountains in West Virginia to get at the anthracite).

*ELECTRIC CARS*
Electric car manufacturing also relies on fossil fuels and other natural 
resources, Gibbs and Zehner emphasize.

"The problem is if you have a big box with wheels and you're going to 
shove it down the highway at a high speed, that takes a lot of energy. 
And there's no way around that. And what electric car proponents have 
done is they've created an illusion that they've found some way to do 
that in a green way, they've found a way around the physics, but they 
haven't," insists Zehner, author of "Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets 
of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism. "It's just that the 
physics have gotten hidden in other parts of the process. So the 
emissions aren't coming out of the tailpipe, they're evolving in other 
ways. They're through the manufacture of the car - like aluminum, for 
instance, which uses 8 times more energy than steel to produce; the 
batteries, which also have a tremendous impact [on the environment]."

Zehner adds, "That's really how all these illusions are created, is that 
pollution isn't occurring where we're used to looking for it. And so we 
assume that, or we fall for the illusion that it's actually not polluting."

*SOLAR POWER*
The sun is an essentially inexhaustible source of energy, right? True 
(so long as the sun exists), but harnessing solar power is not as 
"clean" as some imagine. Planet of the Humans shows how manufacturing 
solar panels (photovoltaic cells) starts with mining quartz, which 
causes environmental degradation in itself.

"The initial refining turns quartz into metallurgical-grade silicon, a 
substance used mostly to harden steel and other metals," notes IEEE 
Spectrum, an engineering and applied sciences publication. "That happens 
in giant furnaces, and keeping them hot takes a lot of energy."

What powers those furnaces? In some cases, natural gas and coal.

*BIOMASS*
Biomass has been touted as "sustainable" and "carbon neutral" (as the 
industry-funded website biomass101.org puts it). But harvesting trees to 
burn as fuel is not the energy solution it's cracked up to be, Gibbs 
believes. In one of the film's distressing sequences 500-year-old yucca 
trees are chewed to bits to feed a biomass operation.

Biomass satisfies about 5-percent of total U.S. energy consumption, 
according to a report updated in 2016 by Columbia University's Earth 
Institute. Germany, meanwhile, considered a leader in moving toward 
renewable energy sources, has built "around 700 biomass plants that 
predominantly burn residual and non-recyclable waste wood to produce 
power and heat," according to Clean Energy Wire.

But how are biomass and other ostensibly "clean" power plants built? 
Using fossil fuels and with materials that contribute to greenhouse gas 
emissions, like concrete, Planet of the Humans states.

Even more importantly, according to the filmmakers, the development of 
"alternative energy" sources like wind, solar and biomass has not, in 
fact, led to a reduction in consumption of fossil fuels.

"Building out an electric car and solar and wind infrastructure and the 
biomass, biofuel infrastructure, is going to run us off the cliff 
faster," Gibbs declares. "Because it's an additional round of mining and 
destruction that does not replace the one [fossil fuels] that's already 
destroying the planet!"

The green energy movement, in fact, has proven counter-productive, Gibbs 
argues.

"It's a giant profit center, unfortunately, for environmental groups 
[that support these 'green illusions'], for corporations, for the people 
mining and destroying the planet," Gibbs maintains. "The people that 
produce our fossil fuels love [the green energy movement] because it 
still uses fossil fuels and it's not a threat to fossil fuels. All the 
car companies love the electric car."
- - - -
by Matt Carey
In Planet of the Humans, Gibbs aims harsh criticism at supposed 
environmental stewards, including the Sierra Club. He says they've been 
bought off by corporate interests that have realized there's lots of 
money to be made in green energy.

"Environmental groups have been collaborating on the lie of growth by 
helping us pretend that there will be 'green growth.' As if you can have 
wealth or stuff that doesn't destroy the planet. News flash: that's an 
impossibility of physics and biology," the director tells me. "There is 
nothing you will ever have in your life that's not an extraction from 
the planet earth. And so we've all lost touch with that."
​
Even Al Gore has lost touch with that, Gibbs asserts (as have, in his 
opinion, environmental and global warming activists like Robert Kennedy 
Jr. and Bill McKibben). In the mid 2000s, the former vice president 
formed a "sustainably focused" investment group with David Blood, a 
one-time executive at Goldman Sachs.

"Mr. Gore says sustainable investing, which he defines as 'improving 
quality of life without borrowing from the future,' is the 'single 
largest investment opportunity in history,'" according to a 2018 piece 
in the Financial Times.

But it is borrowing from the future, Gibbs says in his film. From the 
near future.

"On the surface it looks like we [Gore and prominent environmentalists] 
are all on the same team," Gibbs observes. "It slowly gets funneled down 
to what they're all profiting from. I hate to be that cynical. Have you 
ever heard [Gore] talk about, 'We've got to end infinite economic growth'?"

It's not only opportunists and policy influencers on the left who come 
in for criticism in Planet of the Humans. Gibbs does not neglect the 
conservative Koch brothers, who, he maintains, are the largest single 
beneficiary of government subsidies for green technology. (Koch 
Industries is also heavily into minerals processing, oil pipelines, pulp 
and paper manufacturing).
-- - -
Jeff Gibbs on the "Green New Deal":
The parts of the Green New Deal that have to do with social justice and 
equality are fantastic... [But] the Green New Deal, to the extent it's 
proposing that green energy is going to save us - it's not going to save 
us, it's actually going to kill us faster.
To avoid the potential extinction of the human species, Gibbs believes 
nothing short of a radical reordering of perspective is needed.
- -
The transportation system must be redesigned, Gibbs says, to cut 
dependence on air and automobile travel. He argues for urgent 
development of "high speed rail that will get us away from those cars. 
When are we going to build some ships that we can go across the ocean 
and not have to fly, that are comfortable and not these cruise ships? 
Nobody's even asking the questions, how are we going to do this? So if 
you were really worried about climate change you'd be demanding that we 
have an interstate bus system and an interstate rail system that would 
plummet our carbon footprint, not more individual electric cars."

Regarding population control, I asked Gibbs if he were not concerned 
people might accuse him of advocating the killing of 4 or 5 billion people.

"Here's the answer," he replied. "By not dealing with this you are going 
to kill off 4 or 5 billion people. And it's going to be in somebody 
who's now alive's lifetime. I don't want to be part of that world and I 
don't want to be responsible for abdicating our responsibility. Species 
collapse - and we're on the leading edge of that right now - in an 
uncontrolled collapse the human population could drop to zero... When 
you start to study what happens when civilizations fall apart, it makes 
World War II look like a little party. By us avoiding this we are 
dooming ourselves to that future."
- -
At a Q&A following the world premiere, Michael Moore, the film's 
executive producer, said the filmmaking team has been in discussions 
that could lead to distribution of the film.

"We've talked to sales agents," Moore noted. "We believe that there will 
be a tremendous amount of interest in this film... This is going to get 
distributed. It will be seen. And we need to build that movement. But 
it's got to be a true movement of action and not funded by the very 
people that are destroying the planet."

Gibbs told me of his hopes for the Planet of the Humans looking ahead.

"I'd like to have millions, tens of millions of people see the film - 
hundreds of millions," he commented. "But whatever the future holds I 
think whether it's influencing the right thousand people or the right 10 
million people, I trust the process so we can keep moving forward."
https://www.nonfictionfilm.com/news/planet-of-the-humans-possibly-most-bracing-environmental-documentary-ever-made-premieres-at-traverse-city-film-festival
http://planetofthehumans.com/



[Conjecture: the eco-fascists versus the techno-totalitarians]
https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-climate-change-is-becoming-a-deadly-part-of-white-n-1837010929/amp?__twitter_impression=true
*How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism*
Brian Kahn
This weekend's mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the 
festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president's 
penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been 
authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea 
edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of 
racist message boards.
Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old suspect police took into custody after 
the shooting, is believed to have uploaded a four-page white nationalist 
document to the message board 8chan (it's since been removed from the 
site, which itself has been forced into retreat, and we won't be linking 
to it) outlining his motives for killing at least 22 people at Walmart 
on Saturday. Included among its racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric are 
ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement. "[O]ur lifestyle 
is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the 
environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. 
Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by 
shamelessly overharvesting resources," it reads.

Where Crusius' views violently diverge is the solution to these real 
issues. The manifesto suggests Americans overconsumption will never 
stop, so the only option is "get rid of enough people" to make the 
American lifestyle "more sustainable." Horrific, disgusting, and absurd, 
this so-called ecofascist ideology uses legitimate environmental 
concerns to justify racist policies and, sometimes, mass murder.

This isn't the first time right-wing or fascist figures have pulled from 
environmentalism to further their cause. Some thinkers within Hitler's 
National Socialist party espoused the idea that "[o]nly through a 
re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be 
made stronger," though the relationship of the Nazis and environment is 
a bit more complicated than that. Racists throughout U.S. history have 
often misappropriated population control tied to resource protection, an 
idea popularized in the 18th century by Thomas Malthus. His idea that 
food production couldn't keep up with exponential population growth has 
been debunked since, well... here we are with 7 billion humans on Earth 
and enough food for everyone (if it were distributed equitably, that 
is). Much of the discourse around overpopulation centers on developing 
countries and stereotypes rather than the reality that rich 
countries--and their richest citizens in particular--are the biggest 
resource consumers on Earth.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-climate-change-is-becoming-a-deadly-part-of-white-n-1837010929/amp?__twitter_impression=true



[See also one of the great, classic essays}
*Learning to Live in the Dark: Reading Arendt in the Time of Climate Change*
By Wen Stephenson
There are no historical analogies to be drawn here, no comparisons. We 
live in the present. And yet no comparisons doesn't mean no insights, no 
lessons to be sought. There are no borders in human history that are 
closed, no human experience walled off from an authentic human effort to 
understand. And yet I confess that when I try to make sense of this 
picture, to fit the facts we are facing, planetary and political -- the 
true scale of the unprecedented crimes now unfolding -- into any 
accepted category, I'm at a loss, the mind reels, and I reach for the 
past...
- - -
The opening lines of Hannah Arendt's short, bracing preface to the first 
edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, capture a 
moment and the mood of a generation that had lived through two 
cataclysmic World Wars, experienced economic collapse, revolutions, and 
"homelessness on an unprecedented scale," and now faced the prospect of 
an all-destroying third world war. The mood is one of exhaustion, 
uncertainty, a dull and ever-present fear. "This moment of 
anticipation," she writes,

is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. […] Never has 
our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on 
political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common 
sense and self-interest -- forces that look like sheer insanity, if 
judged by the standards of other centuries...
- - -
Central to Arendt's analysis is her acute observation that totalitarian 
movements, and later fully realized regimes, require the construction of 
a "fictitious world," as seen in their "conspicuous disdain of the whole 
texture of reality." Writing in 1954, between the first and the 
significantly revised 1958 edition of Origins, she observed: "Insofar as 
[totalitarian] ideological thinking is independent of existing reality, 
it looks upon all factuality as fabricated, and therefore no longer 
knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood."...
- -
"Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes."
- - -
The desire to be unburdened of judgment, and of responsibility, is 
pervasive. When the carbon lobby and its apologists, even in elite 
liberal institutions, argue that not oil companies, their lobbyists, and 
the politicians who do their bidding are to blame, but that all of us as 
consumers are guilty -- that it's not, in other words, the oil barons 
and their craven servants who are guilty but "hypocritical" climate 
activists and struggling families everywhere, who rely on oil and gas to 
get to their jobs and to put food on their tables -- it's as if 
apologists for Stalin blamed Soviet dissidents, and the average Soviet 
factory worker, for the horrors of Stalinism.

What we are presented with now is chillingly reminiscent of the 
administrative, institutional, bureaucratic, and above all thoughtless 
criminality that so disturbed Hannah Arendt. In a 1945 essay called 
"Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility," Arendt articulated an 
insight that would later be developed to profound and provocative effect 
in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Nazi system, she observes, "relies not on 
fanatics, nor on congenital murderers, nor on sadists; it relies 
entirely upon the normality of jobholders and family men." What its 
architects and managers, men like Himmler and Eichmann, discovered was 
that "for the sake of his pension, his life insurance, the security of 
his wife and children, such a man was ready to sacrifice his beliefs, 
his honor, and his human dignity." There was just one condition on which 
he insisted: "that he should be fully exempted from responsibility for 
his acts."
- - -
In her book on the Eichmann trial, Arendt describes this phenomenon as 
"the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." Of course, 
our understanding of Eichmann and the surrounding history has improved 
in major ways since then, but the key issue Arendt raised -- whether 
evil intent is required in order for evil to be done -- is still very 
much with us. "The trouble with Eichmann," Arendt writes, "was precisely 
that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor 
sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly 
normal."...
- - -
Neiman argues for the relevance of Arendt's ideas about evil to our own 
situation, explicitly addressing climate catastrophe and the way it 
blurs the traditional lines between "natural" and "moral" evils. She 
goes on to write, "[O]ur knowledge of how much evil can be done without 
intention makes the question of whether or not destruction and suffering 
were deliberate increasingly irrelevant. […] Melting the Arctic? 
Bringing forth hurricanes? What boundaries remain?" Pointing to the 
reckless, even willful failure of government and industry to take the 
actions necessary to preserve a habitable planet, Neiman suggests that 
the terms in which Arendt spoke are entirely applicable. "When human 
heedlessness stokes destruction, then leaves the world's poorest people 
at its mercy, it isn't merely tragic; it's evil," she writes. "And 
nothing but the most banal of intentions is required for it to occur."

And yet the question remains why this matters to us now -- whether the 
satisfactions of judging, smug or otherwise, sitting in a jail cell or 
in an armchair, are all we have left at this late hour...
- - -
There are crimes against humanity the magnitude and cold brutality of 
which cannot be understood, cannot be weighed or calculated on any scale 
or spreadsheet -- crimes, the motives for which are as commonplace, as 
banal, as quarterly earnings and political careers. Crimes that will be 
answered finally by the earth itself, when at last "omnipotent" 
humanity, or rather the heedless few, discover that while everything 
human, and much of the nonhuman, may be destroyed, not everything in the 
end is possible -- regardless of what may or may not be permitted.

What I fear most is that these crimes kill even the desire for, and 
possibility of, birth -- of new women and new men, born not to die but 
to begin.

And so the abyss opens -- and it is all that I can do, perhaps all that 
can be reasonably asked, to hold onto what faith I have in what Hannah 
Arendt called the unsurpassable affirmation, that grace beyond reason, 
without which no amount of illumination can survive.
-
Wen Stephenson is a frequent contributor to The Nation and the author of 
What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front 
Lines of Climate Justice (Beacon Press, 2015).
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/learning-to-live-in-the-dark-reading-arendt-in-the-time-of-climate-change/ 



[Practical advice]
*5 tips for limiting wildfire smoke in your house*
JUL 25, 2019
BY  Anna Boiko-Weyrauch
 From their home on West Seattle, the Pliskes have a panoramic view of 
the Seattle skyline and Beacon Hill.

The last two summers, wildfire smoke has swallowed up the view. "From 
being able to see as far as Mount Baker to not being able to see across 
the street," Janet Pliske said.

The view from their house is the least of their concerns.

About five years ago, her husband, Chuck Pliske, was diagnosed with a 
lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. That 
makes it hard to breathe. Climbing a flight of stairs takes three 
minutes, he said, if he doesn't want to suffer.

"I have two choices: I can either climb the stairs very slowly, or I can 
run up the stairs and then I have to sit down and suffer for a few 
minutes afterwards from not having enough air," he said.

During heavy periods of wildfire smoke, the couple stayed indoors. She 
felt helpless, and reached out to KUOW to ask if there was a way to 
better prepare for this year's wildfire season.

We contacted the American Lung Association, and Xamantha Curameng with 
the Master Home Environmentalist Program stopped by the Pliske's house 
with some advice. The program does free home consultations about how to 
improve indoor air quality.

Xamantha Curameng with the American Lung Association inspects the 
Pliskes' living room air purifier during a home visit, July 2nd, 2019.

*Air purifiers*
Make sure your air purifier does not produce ozone, which irritates the 
lungs. Even low levels of exposure to the gas can harm your health.

When buying an air purifier, stay away from terms like "electronic" and 
"ionizing." Curameng handed the Pliskes a sheet from the California Air 
Resources Board with specific make and model numbers of purifiers that 
don't produce ozone.

On top of that, make sure that the machine is up for the job by matching 
the purifier's capacity to the square footage of the room you want to 
filter. Consumer Reports also has an air purifier buying guide.

*DIY box fan purifier*
You can also make your own air purifier with a filter rated Merv 13 and 
a box fan.

Don't skim on the Merv 13. It is tempting to buy a filter with a lower 
number, but 13 is necessary to screen out the smoke particles.

*Shoes off*
Curameng pulled a small welcome mat out of a bag, black with tight 
ribbing, like what you'd see at the entrance to a mall. Curameng calls 
it a "walk off mat."

The American Lung Association recommends removing your shoes at home, or 
at least using floor mats at the door, so you don't track anything in.

"For example, during a wildfire event, particles that have settled 
outside that have stuck to the bottom of your shoes," Curameng said. 
"Walking over the walk off mat can help prevent you from bringing that 
inside your home."

*Protect your indoor air*
When the air gets smoky, reduce your exposure as much as possible; stay 
inside and close the windows and doors to keep smoke out.

"If you do feel like there is still some smoke coming in, putting a wet 
towel at the cracks of the doors and windows can also help," Curameng said.

And try and keep the air in the home clean. Don't use air fresheners or 
incense and don't fry food, because she says all those release particles 
you would inhale.

*Air filters*
If you have central air in your home, you can upgrade the filter in the 
system to better remove particles from wildfire smoke.

We asked Curameng to venture into the Pliske's basement. Chuck removed a 
hatch on the side of the furnace, pulled out the air filter and handed 
it over. It was a Merv 12 -- too low.

The American Lung Association recommends a filter with a MERV rating of 
13 or above (as long as it works with your central air system). That's a 
measure of efficiency that s   tands for Minimum Efficiency Reporting 
Value; the higher the rating, the more particles in the air the filter 
catches, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
https://kuow.org/stories/how-can-i-prepare-for-wildfire-smoke-in-seattle


[Inevitable]
*In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat 
from climate change. In Iraq, it's already happening*
Baghdad offers a troubling glimpse into a future where only the wealthy 
are equipped to escape the effects of climate change
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/climate-change-apartheid-poor-iraq-effects-heatwave-a9049206.html


[Classic doomerist video from 2017]
*Why everything will collapse*
The 4th monkey
Published on Dec 25, 2017
If you sense that the future looks bleak, that there is little chance 
that this whole mess will end in joy and good humor, that there is a 
tiny chance that we will escape a systemic collapse of the 
thermo-industrial civilization, you are not far from reality. In this 
video, based on the available data, we try to explain why we think the 
situation is inextricable and that a systemic collapse is now inevitable.
view sources at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8&




*This Day in Climate History - August 12, 2004- from D.R. Tucker*

"Like national healthcare, I suspect that global warming will really get 
taken seriously only when the business community finally demands it. 
What BusinessWeek documents is only the first whispers of those demands, 
but the endgame is already in sight."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004498.php
http://web.archive.org/web/20131216021452/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-08-15/global-warming 


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