[TheClimate.Vote] January 21, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 21, 2019/


[follow the money]
*PG&E: The First S&P 500 Climate Change Casualty*
...Future investors will look back on these three months as a turning 
point, and wonder why the effects of climate change on the economic 
underpinnings to our society were not more widely recognized at the time...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkobayashisolomon/2019/01/18/pge-the-first-sp-500-climate-change-casualty/#f4faff62aac2


[major report - video summary 68mins]
*Tony Janetos: The 4th US National Climate Assessment*
Climate State
Published on Jan 20, 2019
Anthony Janetos talks at the Glen Gerberg Weather and Climate Summit, 
about the 4th US National Climate Assessment, January 19, 2019.
Read the report summary here https://nca2018.globalchange.gov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slqeVyMPgAY
- -
[report easy to view]
*Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States*
The National Climate Assessment (NCA) assesses the science of climate 
change and variability and its impacts across the United States, now and 
throughout this century.
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/


[Climate Refugees]
*CLIMATE CHANGE:**
**Activities of Selected Agencies to Address Potential Impact on Global 
Migration*
https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-166


[Paleo-Climatology learning from layers, flat and concentric]
*Tree Rings (Dendrochronology)*
https://scied.ucar.edu/tree-rings
- - -
*Ice Cores for Studying Past Climate Video*
https://scied.ucar.edu/ice-cores-studying-past-climate-movie
- - -
*Lake-bottom Sediments for Studying Past Climate Video*
https://scied.ucar.edu/lake-bottom-sediments-studying-past-climate-movie
--
*Coral for Studying Past Climate Video*
https://scied.ucar.edu/coral-studying-past-climate-movie


[bigger waves]
*Ocean warming is making waves stronger—and that's a problem*
The first systematic analysis of world wave energy spelled trouble for 
coastal communities...
"Upper-ocean warming, a consequence of anthropogenic global warming, is 
changing the global wave climate, making waves stronger," the paper 
reads. Stronger waves could mean faster coastal erosion and greater 
flooding at the places already most immediately impacted by climate change.

Wave power is a measurement of the relationship between wind energy 
(basically, how the wind is blowing and how warm it is) and the upper 
ocean. Waves occur largely because of this relationship. The researchers 
found that wave power has risen globally by 0.4 per cent since 1948. 
Some areas have seen bigger increases than others, but they've all seen 
increases.
https://www.popsci.com/climate-change-wave-energy


[book by DAHR JAMAIL]
*In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve*
In this excerpt from The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning 
in the Path of Climate Disruption, author Dahr Jamail explains how he 
learned to process the heartbreaking truth of inevitable climate 
destruction and the possibility of mass extinction.
In 2015, my best friend, Duane French, came down with pneumonia and was 
taken to the hospital. Pneumonia on its own is bad enough, but for 
someone who has been quadriplegic for more than forty years, it is also 
life threatening. I met Duane when I first moved to Alaska in 1996, then 
I became his personal assistant. Duane is now one of the oldest living 
quadriplegics on the planet and he has always been one of my heroes. He 
broke his neck in a diving accident when he was just fourteen and spent 
his adolescence in a rehabilitation hospital with mangled Vietnam 
veterans returning from the war. Duane decided not to allow something 
like a broken neck and confinement to an electric wheelchair stop him 
from working to help pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. Since 
then, he has run more than one state government division that assists 
people with disabilities.

Struggling to breathe, Duane was moved to the ICU shortly after being 
admitted to the hospital. His partner, Kelly, his personal assistant 
Sakhum, and I took twelve-hour shifts by his bed. Three weeks went by as 
one antibiotic after another failed. Duane's heart rate was over one 
hundred beats per minute for weeks on end. He was barely eating, and he 
began spending more and more time wearing a breathing mask.

Knowing the odds were heavily stacked against him, I sat at his bedside 
and gave him my full attention. When he slept, I watched his chest 
rising and falling, savoring the fact that he was still alive. When it 
was my turn to rest, I would go to bed in Kelly and Duane's guest 
bedroom back at their home, knowing that Duane was still alive. But he 
continued to decline and, as he did, every moment with him was an ever 
more precious gift. It was easier for me to sit by his bed than anywhere 
else on Earth. My heart was breaking; yet I did not want to miss one 
single second of Duane's life. I had no idea if he would survive, and 
that became less relevant as each moment I had with him became 
increasingly inestimable.

Duane's condition grew worse. There appeared to be nothing left to do. 
The nurse administered morphine to calm his struggles to breathe.

Duane ended up, miraculously, pulling through, but the experience stayed 
with me as I wrote this book. Reflecting on what is happening to the 
planet, I realize that the intimacy I shared with Duane when I thought I 
was losing my best friend is the intimacy we should have with the Earth. 
When I thought I was losing Duane, I did not want to leave anything that 
was in my heart for him unsaid, nor were there any wrongs left to make 
right. In an analogous way, we may be watching Earth dying, so we each 
get to ask ourselves: what am I called forth to do at this time? 
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written how "the most precious gift we 
can offer others is our presence. When our mindfulness embraces those we 
love, they will bloom like flowers." Only by sharing an intimacy with 
the natural world can we begin to know, love, and care for her. By 
regaining this intimacy we can begin to understand the ramifications of 
what it is to lose so much of Earth's ice, species, and biosphere. For 
so long we have lived in a world where many never experience this 
intimacy, love, and connection before it's too late.

For decades, many of us have turned a blind eye to what is happening to 
the planet. But now, given that Earth may well be dying, we may be ready 
to stand up to protect what we love. An extraordinary alchemy can take 
place when people follow their inner directives to stand up and face 
squarely the dire odds of biosphere survival. These actions involve 
extraordinary outer and inner courage, which can nurture a profound 
activism. The gifts provided by the crisis at hand are the conditions 
that make possible widespread shifts in political identity, purpose, and 
consciousness.

No one knows if the biosphere will completely collapse. Our future is 
uncertain. Given the fact that a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the 
atmosphere coincided with previous mass extinctions and that we could 
well be facing our own extinction, we should be asking ourselves, "How 
shall I use this precious time?" Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us of the value 
just in being present with what is happening to the planet: "When your 
beloved is suffering, you need to recognize her suffering, anxiety, and 
worries, and just by doing that, you already offer some relief."

Reporting on the catastrophic impact of climate disruption for this book 
involved trips to the front lines of collapsing geo- and biospheres and 
interviews and reports about near-apocalyptic scenarios: about rapidly 
thawing permafrost, the release of methane into the atmosphere, the 
flooding of coastal cities, the increasing likelihood of billions of 
people dying in the not-so-distant future. Though I learned to find a 
way of looking unwaveringly at what was happening to the planet, I fell 
into a deep depression and I began to wonder whether there was any point 
in even writing about this.

I had hoped my work in Iraq would contribute to ending the US occupation 
of that country. I had hoped, too, that writing climate dispatches and 
bludgeoning people with scientific reports about increasingly dire 
predictions of the future would wake them up to the planetary crisis we 
find ourselves in. It has been very difficult for me to surrender that 
hope. But I came to understand that hope blocked the greater need to 
grieve, so that was the reason necessitating the surrendering of it.

Back home from Denali, I had to continue to find a way to balance what I 
was experiencing. I resumed my weekend forays into the nearby Olympic 
National Park. Again drawn to the mountains, I hiked through old-growth 
forests up into alpine basins filled with mountain lakes and hemmed in 
by rugged peaks. Scrambling up steep rocky slopes toward another summit 
and finding a cliff ledge to perch on for a lunch of nuts, dried salmon, 
and coffee, I breathed in the scene below: a valley running toward the 
Strait of Juan de Fuca, the glacier just below the summit of Mount 
Carrie, a raven flying above. I savored every moment. Each trip sparked 
my curiosity about another peak or valley. When I returned home, I 
cleaned my gear and replenished the food bag, and the maps came out 
again, and I would begin packing for my next hike or climb. These forays 
into the mountains are my way of being with the Earth in order to remain 
connected to my sorrow for what is happening, as well as to honor her.

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we 
have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon 
dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no 
changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, 
shall we meet this?

"The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how," author 
and storyteller Stephen Jenkinson, who has worked in palliative care for 
decades, states. "The question is, What shall be the manner of our 
inability to care for what was entrusted to us? The question is our 
manner of failing." Jenkinson, who now makes his living by teaching 
about grief and the acceptance of death as an integral part of living, 
spoke eloquently about grief and climate disruption during a lecture he 
gave at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. When he talks 
about our failure to care for what is entrusted to us, he is also saying 
that the time to change our ways is long past. "Grief requires us to 
know the time we're in," Jenkinson continues. "The great enemy of grief 
is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to 
know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To 
burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are 
two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed."

Each time another scientific study is released showing yet another 
acceleration of the loss of ice atop the Arctic Ocean, or sea level rise 
projections are stepped up yet again, or news of another species that 
has gone extinct is announced, my heart breaks for what we have done and 
are doing to the planet. I grieve, yet this ongoing process has become 
more like peeling back the layers of an onion— there is always more work 
to do as the crisis we have created for ourselves continues to unfold. 
And somewhere along the line I surrendered my attachment to any results 
that might stem from my work. I am hope-free.

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking 
truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is 
happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, 
most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing. 
"Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home 
we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them," 
thinker, writer, and teacher Martín Prechtel writes. "Grief is praise, 
because it is the natural way love honors what it misses." My acceptance 
of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union 
with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of 
my own grief. Grief is something I move through, to territory on the 
other side. This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never 
thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of 
the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have 
found that it's possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, 
while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the 
biosphere declines.

I believe everyone alive is feeling this sorrow for the planet, although 
most are not aware of it. Rather than grieving for her, many are given 
pills for depression, or find other ways to self-medicate. To live well 
involves making amends to the Earth by finding gratitude for every bite 
of food and for every stitch of clothing, for every element in our 
bodies, for it all comes from the Earth. It also means living in a 
community with others who are remaking themselves and their lifestyle in 
accord with what is. "Hope is not the conviction that something will 
turn out well," Czech dissident, writer, and statesman Vaclav Havel 
said, "but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it 
turns out." Writing this book is my attempt to bear witness to what we 
have done to the Earth. I want to make my own amends to the Earth in the 
precious time we have left, however long that might be. I go into my 
work wholeheartedly, knowing that it is unlikely to turn anything 
around. And when the tide does not turn, my heart breaks, over and over 
again as the reports of each succeeding loss continue to come in. The 
grief for the planet does not get easier. Returning to this again and 
again is, I think, the greatest service I can offer in these times. I am 
committed in my bones to being with the Earth, no matter what, to the end.
https://truthout.org/articles/in-facing-mass-extinction-we-dont-need-hope-we-need-to-grieve/
more at - http://www.dahrjamail.net/articles/


[PDF from the University of Nebraska 2016 ]
*Learning to Live with the Trickster:**
**Resilience Theory and Environmental Law in the Anthropocene*
Robin Kundis Craig
...Resilience theory also counsels us that if we don't get serious about 
mitigation,
the climate change trickster will play a bigger and bigger role in our 
lives,
in ways that will make us increasingly uncomfortable.
http://ppc.unl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Nebraska_Living-with-the-Trickster_Thursday_April-2017.pdf


*This Day in Climate History - January 21, 2010 - from D.R. Tucker*
January 21, 2010: The US Supreme Court issues the highly controversial 
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, earning a strong 
rebuke from MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
http://youtu.be/PKZKETizybw
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

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