[TheClimate.Vote] October 8, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/October 8, 2019/

[195 mph aiming for Japan]
*From tropical storm to Category 5 in 18 hours: Super Typhoon Hagibis 
intensifies at one of the fastest rates on record*
On Sunday morning, it was a tropical storm. By Monday morning, it had 
Category 5 winds. Super Typhoon Hagibis, currently moving near the 
Federated States of Micronesia in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, is a 
monster that gathered strength at one of the fastest rates ever observed 
on Earth.

The storm has a massive shield of towering thunderstorms surrounding a 
pinhole-like eye that is just a few miles across.

Its 160 mph winds firmly establish it as a Category 5-equivalent super 
typhoon, looming as a behemoth on satellite after a period of extremely 
rapid intensification...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/10/07/tropical-storm-category-hours-super-typhoon-hagibis-intensifies-one-fastest-rates-record/
- -
[Super Typhoon]
*From Tropical Storm to Category 5, Super Typhoon Hagibis' Rapid 
Intensification One of Most Explosive On Record*
Hagibis went from a tropical storm to a Category 5 super typhoon in 24 
hours Sunday into Monday.
This is among the most rapid intensification rates on record anywhere on 
Earth.
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2019-10-07-super-typhoon-hagibis-rapid-intensification-west-pacific 



[growing activism]
*Rebellion grows against climate emergency*
In 23 major cities across the planet the global movement known as 
Extinction Rebellion has begun two weeks of disruption intended to show 
governments that citizens are not satisfied with their actions to curb 
climate change and to protect wild species.
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/rebellion-grows-against-climate-emergency/
- - -
[XR in NYC activism]
*Climate Change Protests: With Fake Blood, Extinction Rebellion Hits N.Y.*
The provocative climate group is trying to disrupt the city, hoping for 
the success it has had in London and elsewhere in Europe...
- - -
About 90 people were arrested on Monday, according to the New York 
Police Department.
Founded less than a year ago, Extinction Rebellion, which has thousands 
of members around the world, has shut down swaths of London and other 
cities, recruited followers across Europe and beyond and pushed climate 
higher on the political agenda.
It stands out among environmental groups by disrupting "business as 
usual" with mass protests that mix doomsday mourning with 
sometimes-joyful street theater. The demonstrations demand governments 
"tell the truth" about the severity and immediacy of climate change, and 
ask them to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, years earlier 
than any official target...
- - -
The crowd consisted of people of all ages and styles: a "grim reaper" in 
a white skeleton mask and cloak; a gray-haired woman in a 
gauze-and-feather fascinator and a pearl necktie; a group calling itself 
the Red Brigades, whose members wore red costumes with white face paint.
Danica Novgorodoff, a mother of two and a graphic novelist from Brooklyn 
working on a children's book about climate change, marched with her 
7-week-old daughter, Ada, in a stroller.
"I want to make sure there's still a livable world for them to live in," 
she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/nyregion/extinction-rebellion-nyc-protest.html



[Pope Francis - @Pontifex opening Mass for the Synod]
*As Amazon Fires Burn, Pope Convenes Meeting on the Rainforests and 
Moral Obligation to Protect Them*
Two of the most powerful forces in Brazil, the president and the pope, 
are pulling in opposite directions on an issue critical to climate change.
BY GEORGINA GUSTIN
Pope Francis convened nearly 200 bishops, climate experts and indigenous 
people from the Amazon on Sunday for an unprecedented meeting in Rome to 
discuss the fate of the Amazonian rainforests and the world's moral 
obligation to protect them.

The meeting, or Synod, is the first of its kind to address an ecosystem, 
rather than a particular region or theme. It comes as fires continue to 
consume the Amazon rainforest, destroying a critical tool for 
stabilizing the climate, threatening the homes and health of indigenous 
people and drawing global concern.

*"When peoples and cultures are devoured without love and without 
respect, it is not God's fire but that of the world,"* Pope Francis said 
in his opening Mass for the Synod.

God's fire "is fed by sharing, not by profits," he said...
- - -
Pope Has Made Climate Risks a Top Concern
While Catholic leaders, including the pope's predecessor, have said that 
climate change poses a threat to humanity, Francis is the first to make 
climate change a central issue of his papacy.

In 2015, he became the first pope to focus an entire encyclical--an 
authoritative papal document--on the environment. That encyclical, 
called Laudato Si' or "On Care for Our Common Home," was released 
shortly before the Paris climate negotiations and addressed the climate 
crisis in detail.
- - -
'Almost a Recognition of the Rights of Nature'
While many major world religions and religious groups have made 
pronouncements on climate change, calling for their members to embrace 
policies and positions that address the climate crisis, some notable 
ones have not.
- - -
"It's almost a recognition of the rights of nature," he said. "It feels 
like this recognition of non-human life and the importance of nature 
intrinsically and a recognition of how interconnected we are."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05102019/pope-amazon-forest-fires-synod-bolsonaro-religion-catholic-church-climate-change 




["pay no attention to that exhaust"]
*White House Strikes Climate Change Language from Vehicle Emissions 
Proposal*
Date: October 3rd, 2019
Agency: Federal, White House
Explanation: Government Censorship
Scientist: Climate
On October 1, 2019, The Hill reported that E&E News had obtained a 
document that shows that the White House deliberately deleted language 
about climate change from a proposal that limits California's ability to 
set tougher vehicle emissions standards.

In September 2019, President Trump announced that he was revoking the 
waiver that California has used for more than 50 years to require 
tougher emissions standards (thirteen other states also use the 
California standards.)

The draft of the proposal document obtained by E&E News shows that the 
White House struck out the phrase "while global climate change is a 
serious challenge" before explaining why California should not be 
allowed to set stricter emissions standards than the federal government. 
The draft of the document also showed that the White House had removed a 
reference to the Fourth National Climate Assessment which presents a 
harsh picture of the future impact of climate change.

The White House did not respond to request for comment.
http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/silencing-science-tracker/white-house-strikes-climate-change-language-from-vehicle-emissions-proposal/


[more reading]
*Life stories: books about a planet in peril*
 From disappearing mushrooms to the secret life of trees, Amitav Ghosh 
explores the almost incomprehensible realities of our changing world
How do we make sense of the Earth when it seems to be turning against us 
in revenge for its despoliation? The very act of writing about the 
devastation can sometimes create a kind of coherence. Elizabeth Kolbert 
shows us how with The Sixth Extinction, where she focuses on a few of 
the million or so species that are dying out in what is now known to be 
one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the Earth. The 
closeness of the focus creates a powerful sense of empathy, not just 
with the vanishing creatures but also with the writer as she struggles 
to account for the horrors to which she is bearing witness.

Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice is another unflinching attempt to grapple 
with almost incomprehensible realities. Jamail travels widely and 
listens closely to scientists, and to people whose ways of life are 
threatened by ecological breakdown. "The grief for the planet does not 
get easier," he writes. "Returning to this again and again is, I think, 
the greatest service I can offer in these times."

Our current predicament is both overwhelming and elusive, manifesting 
itself not in big events but in what the Princeton professor Rob Nixon 
calls a kind of "slow violence", revealed in small but telling details. 
Such details abound in Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud, a memoir of her 
experience of building a house in a very challenging location in 
Wyoming. Proulx has always paid close attention to landscape and this is 
no exception: it is the terrain that awakens the writer to the effects 
of planetary changes...
A memoir of a completely different kind is Roy Scranton's Learning to 
Die in the Anthropocene. Scranton served in Iraq as a private in the US 
army and he draws on that experience in trying to understand the 
implications of climate crisis for himself and his loved ones: the 
result is a book that is fiercely urgent and deeply poignant.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing goes in search of 
the much-prized matsutake mushroom, found only in certain damaged 
forests. The matsutake serves as both vehicle and metaphor for a 
giddying exploration of capitalism, networks of trade and the hidden 
lives of forests, ultimately opening up the possibility of salvaging 
meaning from an increasingly disordered reality.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/books-make-sense-wounded-planet-amitav-ghosh



[Inside Climate News]
*In the Mountains, Climate Change Is Disrupting Everything, from How 
Water Flows to When Plants Flower*
The melting of glaciers and loss of snow has a cascading effect for 
ecosystems, agriculture and billions of people downstream.
- - -
Mountain snowpack is shrinking and melting earlier in the spring. Warmer 
and longer summers dry out vegetation and increase the threat of 
wildfires in western mountain forests, where the fire season has 
lengthened by at least a month since 1979.

The growing wildfire risk is just part of an accelerating cycle of 
global warming impacts in the world's mountain regions, according to a 
new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that includes a 
section focused on mountains for the first time in more than 20 years...
- - -
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07102019/mountain-climate-change-disruption-glaciers-water-ecosystems-agriculture-plants-food



[ETHICS and CLIMATE:]
*What Climate Activists and the Media Should Learn from Greta Thunberg's 
September 23 UN Speech *
[Greta video - 5 minutes - https://youtu.be/DYqtXR8iPlE]
Greta Thunberg's September 23rd speech at the UN on climate change was a 
brilliant lesson both on the potential power of bringing attention to 
moral bankruptcy of arguments made by opponents of needed climate change 
policies, as well as a model for how to make moral and ethical arguments 
critical of reasons offered in opposition to climate policies.  
Thunberg's speech successfully demonstrated the power of moral arguments 
critical of claims made by opponents of climate change policies for two 
reasons: first, because of her speech's rhetorical excellence, and 
second for Thunberg's selection of facts about climate change which 
supported the speech's main thesis that governments' failures to act to 
reduce the threat of climate change are morally repugnant.

*A. The Speech's Rhetorical Excellence*
Aristotle claimed in his writing on rhetoric that speakers are effective 
in persuading their listeners if the speaker exhibits three qualities: 
Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

*Ethos.*  Speakers exhibit ethos if they convince listeners that the
speaker is motivated by what is right or wrong, not by
self-interest. Greta Thunberg effectively communicated by her choice
of words, rhythm, and emotions that she was motivated by the moral
indefensibility of governments that have refused to do what is
necessary to avoid climate change harms given the facts she stated
in support of this conclusion.
*Pathos*. Effective speakers demonstrate some passion about the
injustice that is motivating him or her. Greta Thunberg's display of
anger was palpable and supported by the facts she relied upon.
*Logos*. In an effective speech, the speaker's claims and
conclusions are clear and logical. The facts which motivated and
supported the premise of her speech, namely that governments'
responses to climate change are morally repugnant were clearly stated.

*B. The Speech's Foundational Facts*
The facts the speech relied upon to support the claim that governments' 
responses to climate change are morally indefensible were very 
persuasive. The speech made the following claims about governments' 
inadequate response to climate change:

1, You have stolen my dreams. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are
collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all
you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

2. The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years
only gives us a 50 % chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius],
and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond
human control.

3. 50% may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include
tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by
toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.
They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons
of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

4. "So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us -- we who have to
live with the consequences.

5. "To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global
temperature rise - the best odds given by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. - the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to
emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to
less than 350 gigatons.

6. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business
as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions
levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less
than 8 1/2 years.

7. "There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with
these figures here today, because these numbers are too
uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like
it is.

She then invited listeners to reflect on the moral significance of these 
facts by repeating the words "How dare you" four times after stating the 
facts.

The facts that Greta Thunberg relied on to support her conclusion that 
governments' inadequate responses to climate change are morally 
indefensible effectively supported this conclusion.
- - -
There are many other facts that proponents of climate change policies 
could also rely on to support the conclusion that governments' 
inadequate responses to climate change are morally indefensible. For 
instance proponents of climate change policies could bring attention to 
the following facts which also support the conclusion that governments' 
inadequate responses to climate change are morally indefensible:
The staggering magnitude of percent reductions in GHG emissions needed 
to achieve any warming limit goal such as 1.5 C or 2.0 C become greater 
the longer governments wait to respond because current emissions are 
rapidly consuming any carbon budget that the world must live within to 
achieve any warming limit goal.
- - -
Sociologists also claim that the most successful social movements are 
energized by a strong sense of unfairness or injustice of the status 
quo. For this reason, although appeals to the self-interest of citizens 
based upon identifying the harms from climate change that they will 
experience should continue, such an appeal to self-interest alone does 
not justify ignoring the strong moral problems with the arguments of 
those who oppose climate change policies. In addition, as we have 
explained in the recent website entry UNESCO Examines the Urgency of and 
Strategy for Getting Traction for Ethical Guidance in Climate Change 
Policy Formation at Bangkok Program.there is no hope of averting 
catastrophic climate impacts unless governments comply with their 
ethical obligations under the UNFCCC. Moreover. not raising ethical 
problems with the arguments of those opposing climate change policies is 
a practical mistake because most arguments made by opponents of climate 
policies fail to survive minimum ethical scrutiny. They usually violate 
non-controversial, widely agreed-upon ethical principles such as human 
rights obligations, the "no-harm" principle of customary international 
law, or the "precautionary principle" expressly agreed to by all nations 
in the 1992 UNFCCC among many other ethical principles.

For these reasons, Greta Thunberg's UN speech should be honored and used 
as an inspiration by climate activists around the world while 
encouraging the media to cover the ethical issues raised by climate 
change formation controversies.
By:
Donald A. Brown
Scholar in Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law
Widener University Commonwealth Law School
dabrown57 at gmail.com
https://ethicsandclimate.org/2019/10/07/what-climate-activists-should-learn-from-greta-thunbergs-september-23-un-speech/



[Cultural Comment - edited classic Franzen essay in the NewYorker]
*What If We Stopped Pretending?*
The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit 
that we can't prevent it.
By Jonathan Franzen - September 8, 2019

There is infinite hope," Kafka tells us, "only not for us." This is a 
fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for 
ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to 
get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening 
world, that the converse of Kafka's quip is equally true: There is no 
hope, except for us...

I'm talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in 
global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the 
feel of Kafka's fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and 
despite earnest efforts we've made essentially no progress toward 
reaching it.
- - -
Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you're younger 
than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical 
destabilization of life on earth--massive crop failures, apocalyptic 
fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of 
refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent 
drought. If you're under thirty, you're all but guaranteed to witness it.
If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live 
on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping 
that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or 
enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is 
coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to 
abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it's time to 
"roll up our sleeves" and "save the planet"; that the problem of climate 
change can be "solved" if we summon the collective will. Although this 
message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully 
clear, we've emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years 
as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts 
have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact 
that I'll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. 
Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the 
reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus 
on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still 
basically normal--seasons changing, another election year coming, new 
comedies on Netflix--and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap 
my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious 
or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of 
dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it's gone forever. 
Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of 
increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization 
begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and 
maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.
- -

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican 
Party's position on climate science is well known, but denial is 
entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. 
The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial 
proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to 
avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan 
renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those 
proposals deploy the language of "stopping" climate change, or imply 
that there's still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the 
left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed 
allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone 
seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate 
change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of 
control. The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we'll 
pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by 
more than two degrees Celsius (maybe a little more, but also maybe a 
little less). The I.P.C.C.--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change--tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we 
not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to 
approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust 
the I.P.C.C.'s calculations. New research, described last month in 
Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from 
exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace 
and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, 
scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host 
of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten 
thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make 
a "best" prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist 
predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she's merely naming a number 
about which she's very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. 
The rise might, in fact, be far higher.
- - -
As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future 
scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology 
and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy 
consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy 
have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios 
in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I 
draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share 
certain necessary conditions.
The first condition is that every one of the world's major polluting 
countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of 
its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its 
economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions 
from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal 
lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions "allowance"--the further 
gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold 
of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new 
energy and transportation projects already planned or under 
construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention 
needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. 
Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep 
pumping oil and driving pickup trucks...
- - -
Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem 
can't be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative 
action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but 
an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to 
date. The activists who make it remind me of the religious leaders who 
fear that, without the promise of eternal salvation, people won't bother 
to behave well. In my experience, nonbelievers are no less loving of 
their neighbors than believers. And so I wonder what might happen if, 
instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.

First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees 
of warming, there's still a strong practical and ethical case for 
reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no 
difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no 
return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the 
shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. 
Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of 
warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point 
of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the 
speed at which it's advancing, the almost monthly shattering of 
temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer 
devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it 
would be a goal worth pursuing.

In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To 
fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are 
available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very 
well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions 
of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn't mean 
that they're meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. 
During the Protestant Reformation, when "end times" was merely an idea, 
not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question 
was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into 
Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they're 
good--because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world 
would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, 
and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that 
it will save me.

More than that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If 
you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit 
yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone's 
overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of 
complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, 
avoiding air travel, you might feel that you've done everything you can 
for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that 
the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, 
there's a whole lot more you should be doing.

Our resources aren't infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a 
longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will 
save us, it's unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent 
on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North 
America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations 
to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every 
renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem--the 
"green" energy development now occurring in Kenya's national parks, the 
giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms 
in open spaces, rather than in settled areas--erodes the resilience of a 
natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, 
overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries--collective 
will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of 
carbon, they're within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech 
conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating 
less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive 
industrial changes.

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was 
winnable. Once you accept that we've lost it, other kinds of action take 
on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a 
directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the 
urgency of almost any world-improving action. *In times of increasing 
chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than 
in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia 
is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, 
functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more 
just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate 
action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme 
wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines 
on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration 
policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for 
laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, 
ridding the country of assault weapons--these are all meaningful climate 
actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the 
natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and 
healthy as we can make it.*

And then there's the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends 
on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, 
when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the 
planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I 
might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them 
longer-term, most of them shorter. It's fine to struggle against the 
constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what's to 
come, but it's just as important to fight smaller, more local battles 
that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing 
for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love 
specifically--a community, an institution, a wild place, a species 
that's in trouble--and take heart in your small successes. Any good 
thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the 
really meaningful thing is that it's good today. As long as you have 
something to love, you have something to hope for...
Jonathan Franzen is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the 
author of, most recently, the novel "Purity."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending


[Bird-acopalypse]
*Decline of the North American avifauna*
Kenneth V. Rosenberg1,2,, Adriaan M. Dokter1, Peter J. Blancher3, John 
R. Sauer4, Adam C. Smith5, Paul A. Smith3, Jessica C. Stanton6, Arvind 
Panjabi7, Laura Helft1, Michael Parr2, Peter P. Marra8,
Science  04 Oct 2019:
Vol. 366, Issue 6461, pp. 120-124
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw1313
*Staggering decline of bird populations*
Because birds are conspicuous and easy to identify and count, reliable 
records of their occurrence have been gathered over many decades in many 
parts of the world. Drawing on such data for North America, Rosenberg et 
al. report wide-spread population declines of birds over the past 
half-century, resulting in the cumulative loss of billions of breeding 
individuals across a wide range of species and habitats. They show that 
declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species--those once 
considered common and wide-spread are also diminished. These results 
have major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of 
wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of 
birds and native ecosystems on which they depend.

*Abstract*
Species extinctions have defined the global biodiversity crisis, but 
extinction begins with loss in abundance of individuals that can result 
in compositional and functional changes of ecosystems. Using multiple 
and independent monitoring networks, we report population losses across 
much of the North American avifauna over 48 years, including once-common 
species and from most biomes. Integration of range-wide population 
trajectories and size estimates indicates a net loss approaching 3 
billion birds, or 29% of 1970 abundance. A continent-wide weather radar 
network also reveals a similarly steep decline in biomass passage of 
migrating birds over a recent 10-year period. This loss of bird 
abundance signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future 
avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function, 
and services.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120



[tweet clip]
Prof. Katharine Hayhoe @KHayhoe
by georgina_gustin
**
1/ it's not happening + you scientists are making it up for the $
2/ it's not humans
3/ warmer is better! bring it on
4/ adapting is cheaper than cutting carbon and ... geoengineering!
5/ it's too late. You scientists really shdv told us earlier

https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/1177287129019428865



*This Day in Climate History - October 8, 1979 - from D.R. Tucker*
October 8, 1979: People Magazine reports on growing concerns about a 
human-caused climate crisis.

*CO2 Could Change Our Climate and Flood the Earth--Up to Here*
By Michael J. Weiss October 08, 1979 12:00 PM
If Gordon MacDonald is wrong, they'll laugh, otherwise, they'll gurgle

The scenario reads like an Irwin Allen disaster movie. Early in the
21st century, carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere thickens
ominously. The CO2 admits sunlight but prevents escape of heat from
the planet's surface, creating a situation known as the "greenhouse
effect." Average temperatures increase, from 3 to 20F, melting ice
at the poles. Oceans rise everywhere by perhaps 20 feet, inundating
coastal cities. Some 25 percent of the world's population must flee
to higher ground. Food shortages follow. All is chaos.

Purveyor of this doomsday theory--the man Charlton Heston would play
in the movie--is Gordon MacDonald, 50, a geology and environmental
sciences professor at Dartmouth. Researchers have long worried about
the effects of carbon dioxide produced by burning oil, gas and coal.
MacDonald says the Carter administration's proposal to develop
synthetic fuels by converting coal into oil and gas involves a
process that will dramatically increase the CO2 level. With
synfuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide could double by 2020, MacDonald
predicts. As a result, new temperature patterns could begin to
change the weather all over the globe by 1990.

"The Adirondacks and New England might not get snow," he predicts.
"In Washington, summer highs will jump from the 90s to the 100s.
Some leafy plants like corn and sugar beets will benefit from
increased photosynthesis, but you'll see a 30- to 40-percent drop in
wheat production. That's because the latitudes suitable for wheat
will move north, where the land lacks nutrients to support intensive
agriculture."

MacDonald has taken his concern to Congress as well as to the
scientific community, and he has credentials in both. At 32, he was
one of the youngest members ever elected to the National Academy of
Sciences in 1962. His résumé lists 134 published articles, plus 10
major lecture series. He has also been an adviser to Presidents
Eisenhower (on space exploration), Kennedy (weather), Johnson (ocean
pollution), Nixon (coal), Ford (technology exchange) and Carter
(national security). "Nixon," MacDonald remembers, "would say he had
three summa cum laudes from the Harvard class of 1950: Jim
Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger and me." (At the National Academy of
Sciences in 1963 MacDonald first ran across statistics relating
climate to CO2; since the late 1950s carbon dioxide is up to 10
percent in the atmosphere, but because the ocean is still absorbing
it, no real temperature changes have occurred.)

The greenhouse theory continues to be the subject of heated debate.
Some scientists contend the oceans will never become so saturated
with CO2 that the climate is affected. Dan Dreyfus, staff director
of the Senate Energy Committee, dismisses MacDonald's fears by more
or less dismissing him. "He's a generalist," Dreyfus says. "Carbon
dioxide is not the only thing he's interested in, and it's a very
complicated geophysical problem. I don't think anyone can definitely
say what effect increased CO2 will have on the climate." Yet in
July, when MacDonald and other scientists reported on CO2 to the
President's Council on Environmental Quality, the council called it
"an extremely important, perhaps historic, statement."

As an alternative to synthetic fuels, MacDonald suggests a mix of
solar energy, fusion, natural gas and biomass (mostly alcohol-based
fuels made from converting trees, sugarcane and other plants). He
prefers natural gas, which produces little carbon dioxide. He's
lobbying for it while on leave from Dartmouth to work as chief
scientist at the MITRE Corporation, a goverment-funded Washington
think tank.

MacDonald grew up in Mexico City, the son of a British mining
executive and an American embassy clerk. He became a U.S. citizen in
1955 and taught at UCLA and California (Santa Barbara) before moving
to Dartmouth in 1972. His first marriage ended in divorce. He has
three children by his second wife, who died of cancer; he has a son
with his third wife.

With CO2, MacDonald is of course presenting the worst case scenario
with great flair. "He isn't the usual ass-covering bureaucrat," an
Energy Committee staffer marveled after MacDonald testified against
the Carter synfuel proposal. "He provided quite a show." MacDonald
realizes that if he is wrong, his warnings will sound ridiculous. If
not, world catastrophe will result--"not 200 years from now but
within our lifetime."
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20074765,00.html
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