[TheClimate.Vote] September 16, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/September 16, 2019/

[downwind]
*Wildfire smoke to affect Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Montana on Sunday*
Red Flag Warnings for areas in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/09/15/wildfire-smoke-to-affect-oregon-idaho-colorado-and-montana-on-sunday/


[CBS News now reporting on climate change (or at least for the next week 
or so)]
*Climate Change: Five Things to Know*
Published on Sep 15, 2019
Face the Nation
Margaret Brennan with five things to know about climate change and its 
impact on the world already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SQqQImoSL4



[Beckwith videos]
*Last Remaining Arctic Sea Ice Will Likely be that Orbiting the North 
Pole, and NOT Along Coastlines*
Published on Sep 15, 2019
Paul Beckwith
Most scientists think when Arctic sea ice essentially vanishes at the 
end of summer melt season, there will still be some remaining ice near 
coastlines, for example amongst the Canadian Archipelago islands. Thus, 
we define what I first coined a Blue Ocean Event as being the first time 
ice extent in the Arctic Ocean drops below one million square 
kilometres. I think that this last remaining ice will be circling around 
the North Pole, above 85 degrees latitude, since it has the least amount 
of surface melt (low sunlight), and slow bottom melt in a stratified 
lens of cold, fresh water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3v3QCpRAcQ
- - -
[2 of 2]
*New Ice Behaviour Regime for Arctic Sea Ice Melt*
Published on Sep 13, 2019
Paul Beckwith
I continue discussing details of Arctic sea ice melt, including the 
puzzling stalling of the extent drop in mid-August; yet continuation of 
volume loss to match 2012 (year that set records for both lowest volume 
and lowest extent). Physical properties of the sea ice remaining are 
different since most of the stronger, purer (less salt content), 
thicker, older multi-year ice has melted out, or been exported and 
melted, leaving behind only weaker, saltier, thinner, younger first year 
and second year ice. We are in a new ice behaviour regime, with 
different melt and freeze dynamics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH3oGQt9VUo



[Sunday opinion]
*Naomi Klein: 'We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate 
barbarism'*
September 15th, 2019, by Natalie Hanman
*Why are you publishing this book now?*

I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too 
compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really 
strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the 
crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and 
the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and 
the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and 
interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

*The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your 
mind about anything?*

When I look back, I don't think I placed enough emphasis on the 
challenge climate change poses to the left. It's more obvious the way 
the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the 
cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that's 
always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to 
a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing 
the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources 
from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

*What's stopping the left doing this?*

In a North American context, it's the greatest taboo of all to actually 
admit that there are going to be limits. You see that in the way Fox 
News has gone after the Green New Deal - they are coming after your 
hamburgers! It cuts to the heart of the American dream - every 
generation gets more than the last, there is always a new frontier to 
expand to, the whole idea of settler colonial nations like ours. When 
somebody comes along and says, actually, there are limits, we've got 
some tough decisions, we need to figure out how to manage what's left, 
we've got to share equitably - it is a psychic attack. And so the 
response [on the left] has been to avoid, and say no, no, we're not 
coming to take away your stuff, there are going to be all kinds of 
benefits. And there are going to be benefits: we'll have more livable 
cities, we'll have less polluted air, we'll spend less time stuck in 
traffic, we can design happier, richer lives in so many ways. But we are 
going to have to contract on the endless, disposable consumption side.

*Do you feel encouraged by talk of the Green New Deal?*

I feel a tremendous excitement and a sense of relief, that we are 
finally talking about solutions on the scale of the crisis we face. That 
we're not talking about a little carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme as 
a silver bullet. We're talking about transforming our economy. This 
system is failing the majority of people anyway, which is why we're in 
this period of such profound political destabilisation - that is giving 
us the Trumps and the Brexits, and all of these strongman leaders - so 
why don't we figure out how to change everything from bottom to top, and 
do it in a way that addresses all of these other crises at the same 
time? There is every chance we will miss the mark, but every fraction of 
a degree warming that we are able to hold off is a victory and every 
policy that we are able to win that makes our societies more humane, the 
more we will weather the inevitable shocks and storms to come without 
slipping into barbarism. Because what really terrifies me is what we are 
seeing at our borders in Europe and North America and Australia - I 
don't think it's coincidental that the settler colonial states and the 
countries that are the engines of that colonialism are at the forefront 
of this. We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism. 
We saw it in Christchurch, we saw it in El Paso, where you have this 
marrying of white supremacist violence with vicious anti-immigrant racism.

*That is one of the most chilling sections of your book: I think that's 
a link a lot of people haven't made.*

This pattern has been clear for a while. White supremacy emerged not 
just because people felt like thinking up ideas that were going to get a 
lot of people killed but because it was useful to protect barbaric but 
highly profitable actions. The age of scientific racism begins alongside 
the transatlantic slave trade, it is a rationale for that brutality. If 
we are going to respond to climate change by fortressing our borders, 
then of course the theories that would justify that, that create these 
hierarchies of humanity, will come surging back. There have been signs 
of that for years, but it is getting harder to deny because you have 
killers who are screaming it from the rooftops.

*One criticism you hear about the environment movement is that it is 
dominated by white people. How do you address that?*

When you have a movement that is overwhelmingly representative of the 
most privileged sector of society then the approach is going to be much 
more fearful of change, because people who have a lot to lose tend to be 
more fearful of change, whereas people who have a lot to gain will tend 
to fight harder for it. That's the big benefit of having an approach to 
climate change that links it to those so called bread and butter issues: 
how are we going to get better paid jobs, affordable housing, a way for 
people to take care of their families? I have had many conversations 
with environmentalists over the years where they seem really to believe 
that by linking fighting climate change with fighting poverty, or 
fighting for racial justice, it's going to make the fight harder. We 
have to get out of this "my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we 
save the planet and then we fight poverty and racism, and violence 
against women". That doesn't work. That alienates the people who would 
fight hardest for change. This debate has shifted a huge amount in the 
US because of the leadership of the climate justice movement and because 
it is congresswomen of colour who are championing the Green New Deal. 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida 
Tlaibcome from communities that have gotten such a raw deal under the 
years of neoliberalism and longer, and are determined to represent, 
truly represent, the interests of those communities. They're not afraid 
of deep change because their communities desperately need it.

*In the book, you write: "The hard truth is that the answer to the 
question 'What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?' is: 
nothing." Do you still believe that?*

In terms of the carbon, the individual decisions that we make are not 
going to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we 
need. And I do believe that the fact that for so many people it's so 
much more comfortable to talk about our own personal consumption, than 
to talk about systemic change, is a product of neoliberalism, that we 
have been trained to see ourselves as consumers first. To me that's the 
benefit of bringing up these historical analogies, like the New Deal or 
the Marshall Plan - it brings our minds back to a time when we were able 
to think of change on that scale. Because we've been trained to think 
very small. It is incredibly significant that Greta Thunberg has turned 
her life into a living emergency.

*Yes, she set sail for the UN climate summit in New York on a zero 
carbon yacht …*

Exactly. But this isn't about what Greta is doing as an individual. It's 
about what Greta is broadcasting in the choices that she makes as an 
activist, and I absolutely respect that. I think it's magnificent. She 
is using the power that she has to broadcast that this is an emergency, 
and trying to inspire politicians to treat it as an emergency. I don't 
think anybody is exempt from scrutinising their own decisions and 
behaviours but I think it is possible to overemphasise the individual 
choices. I have made a choice - and this has been true since I wrote No 
Logo, and I started getting these "what should I buy, where should I 
shop, what are the ethical clothes?" questions. My answer continues to 
be that I am not a lifestyle adviser, I am not anyone's shopping guru, 
and I make these decisions in my own life but I'm under no illusion that 
these decisions are going to make the difference.

*Some people are choosing to go on birth strikes. What do you think 
about that?*

I'm happy these discussions are coming into the public domain as opposed 
to being furtive issues we're afraid to talk about. It's been very 
isolating for people. It certainly was for me. One of the reasons I 
waited as long as I did to try and get pregnant, and I would say this to 
my partner all the time - what, you want to have a Mad Max water warrior 
fighting with their friends for food and water? It wasn't until I was 
part of the climate justice movement and I could see a path forward that 
I could even imagine having a kid. But I would never tell anybody how to 
answer this most intimate of questions. As a feminist who knows the 
brutal history of forced sterilisation and the ways in which women's 
bodies become battle zones when policymakers decide that they are going 
to try and control population, I think that the idea that there are 
regulatory solutions when it comes to whether or not to have kids is 
catastrophically ahistorical. We need to be struggling with our climate 
grief together and our climate fears together, through whatever decision 
we decide to make, but the discussion we need to have is how do we build 
a world so that those kids can have thriving, zero-carbon lives?

*Over the summer, you encouraged people to read Richard Powers's novel, 
The Overstory. Why?*

It's been incredibly important to me and I'm happy that so many people 
have written to me since. What Powers is writing about trees: that trees 
live in communities and are in communication, and plan and react 
together, and we've been completely wrong in the way we conceptualise 
them. It's the same conversation we're having about whether we are going 
to solve this as individuals or whether we are going to save the 
collective organism. It's also rare, in good fiction, to valorise 
activism, to treat it with real respect, failures and all, to 
acknowledge the heroism of the people who put their bodies on the line. 
I thought Powers did that in a really extraordinary way.

*What are you views on what Extinction Rebellion has achieved?*

One thing they have done so well is break us out of this classic 
campaign model we have been in for a long time, where you tell someone 
something scary, you ask them to click on something to do something 
about it, you skip out the whole phase where we need to grieve together 
and feel together and process what it is that we just saw. Because what 
I hear a lot from people is, ok, maybe those people back in the 1930s or 
40s could organise neighbourhood by neighbourhood or workplace by 
workplace but we can't. We believe we've been so downgraded as a species 
that we are incapable of that. The only thing that is going to change 
that belief is getting face to face, in community, having experiences, 
off our screens, with one another on the streets and in nature, and 
winning some things and feeling that power.

*You talk about stamina in the book. How do you keep going? Do you feel 
hopeful?*

I have complicated feelings about the hope question. Not a day goes by 
that I don't have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete 
conviction that we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I'm 
renewed by this new generation that is so determined, so forceful. I'm 
inspired by the willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my 
generation, when we were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion 
around getting our hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a 
lot of opportunities. What gives me the most hope right now is that 
we've finally got the vision for what we want instead, or at least the 
first rough draft of it. This is the first time this has happened in my 
lifetime. And also, I did decide to have kids. I have a seven year old 
who is so completely obsessed and in love with the natural world. When I 
think about him, after we've spent an entire summer talking about the 
role of salmon in feeding the forests where he was born in British 
Columbia, and how they are linked to the health of the trees and the 
soil and the bears and the orcas and this entire magnificent ecosystem, 
and I think about what it would be like to have to tell him that there 
are no more salmon, it kills me. So that motivates me. And slays me.
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/naomi-klein-we-are-seeing-the-beginnings-of-the-era-of-climate-barbarism/


[Brazil statesman in US on Sept 19]
*Brazil environment minister to meet US climate denier group before UN 
summit*
Ricardo Salles to meet Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
Brazil's environment minister, Ricardo Salles, will meet a rightwing US 
advocacy group that denies climate change, just four days before the 
United Nations Climate Action Summit.

Salles will meet representatives from the Competitive Enterprise 
Institute (CEI) at the headquarters of the US Environmental Protection 
Agency on 19 September, Brazil's Folha de S Paulo newspaper revealed.

The meeting was immediately condemned by environmentalists, who said it 
showed that the government of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, 
had no commitment to fighting the climate crisis...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/brazil-environment-minister-climate-denier-group-ricardo-salles



[Opinion]
*This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It's the First Extermination Event.*
Justin McBrien, Truthout
September 14, 2019

 From the "insect apocalypse" to the "biological annihilation" of 60 
percent of all wild animals in the past 50 years, life is careening 
across every planetary boundary that might stop it from experiencing a 
"Great Dying" once more.

But the atrocity unfolding in the Amazon, and across the Earth, has no 
geological analogue -- to call it the "sixth extinction event" is to 
make what is an active, organized eradication sound like some kind of 
passive accident. This is no asteroid or volcanic eruption or slow 
accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere due to cyanobacteria 
photosynthesis.

We are in the midst of the First Extermination Event, the process by 
which capital has pushed the Earth to the brink of the Necrocene, the 
age of the new necrotic death.

For some 500 years, capitalism's logic of eco-genocidal accumulation has 
presided over both the physical eradication of human and non-human life 
and the cultural eradication of the languages, traditions and collective 
knowledge that constitute life's diversity. It necrotizes the planetary 
biosphere, leaving behind only decay. It burns the practically 
unrecoverable library of life and eradicates its future masterpieces 
simultaneously. It inflicts not just physical destruction, but 
psychological grief and trauma as people witness their lands go under 
the sea, get immolated by fire, and drown in mud. The First 
Extermination Event has now produced such a nightmarish world that even 
temperature maps scream in agony.

The specter of the First Extermination might haunt us all but it does so 
with stark disparities, mapping the geography of capital's historical 
inequities.

Small island states formulate plans to relocate their populations 
already existentially threatened by rising sea levels. Extreme weather 
events like Hurricanes Katrina and Maria disproportionately affect 
low-income and communities of color, producing far higher causality 
rates comparative to other disasters of their magnitude and whose 
effects are often doubly disastrous, as nearly half of these communities 
live in proximity to toxic "sacrifice zones." Droughts and famines, such 
as in Syria and Yemen, exacerbate conflicts and force mass migrations of 
people -- the vast majority women and children -- while eco-fascists 
mobilize the affective politics of grievance to turn capitalism's 
"climate emergency" to their own advantage, sloganeering about "trees 
before refugees" while calling for mass murder.

Yet, most popular discussion of the sixth extinction still indulges in 
sweeping catastrophist pronouncements about "humanity" writ large, often 
failing even to mention the word "capitalism," much less account for its 
centrality to the historical production of mass extinction.

Environmental historian Jason W. Moore's work has shown that capitalism 
is not merely an economic system, but a world-ecology searching to 
exploit "cheap natures," a process that must perpetually reassemble life 
to penetrate more and more frontiers of potential profit. Capital must 
reproduce its means of production through its perpetual destruction.

The fundamental importance of the search for cheap nature and unpaid 
labor to historical capitalist development has been well explored by 
scholars. It was not the industrial revolution and its production of the 
"doubly free" wage laborer, but racialized enslavement, mass 
witch-hunts, and destruction of Indigenous peoples and ecologies that 
produced the conditions for capital to thrive.

Through to the present, accumulation of capital has proceeded by the 
violent dispossession or outright murder of peoples, followed by the 
necrotic extraction of resources that destroys its local ecology for the 
sake of accumulation. The cumulative results of this process, replicated 
across the globe, have come to affect deep-time transformations to life 
at the planetary scale through its very erasure.

This is how capital capitalizes on its own catastrophes, sustaining the 
production of "life" under its aegis every day and accelerating the 
death of life across the Earth. This is no "creative destruction"; it is 
simply self-annihilation.

It is for this reason that global attention has turned to the Amazon 
this year. Perhaps the fires will consume the last vestiges of the 
fantasy of an ossified international liberal order capable of stopping 
this planetary crisis.

A ghoulish faction of petty autocrats takes stage for the final act, 
exemplars of kakistocratic decadence and the apotheosis of a toxic 
sludge of decaying neoliberalism, climate catastrophe, white supremacy 
and conspiratorial gibberish. President Trump and Brazilian President 
Jair Bolsonaro are caricatures of the First Extermination Event. 
History's tragedy now runs concurrent with its farce -- the smirk of the 
tabloid huckster, the new face of the banality of evil. But truly, they 
are two sides of the same coin.

"Green" capital is simply the fetishized, phantom-like objectivity of 
capital's absolute necrosis. It is not a contradictory attempt to 
"sustainably" square the circle of endless accumulation, or "save 
capitalism from itself"; rather, it is another form of accumulation that 
sees the destruction capital wreaks as an opportunity for further 
profit. Branding itself as a solution to this destruction, it further 
incentivizes its continuation by existing only as another option for 
accumulation when other avenues are closed off. It would cease to exist 
without the necrotic entropy to which it owes its reason for being.

As its monstrous appetite begins to consume the people who previously 
benefited from its machinations, capital must seek to confuse, turn 
incoherent, become conspiratorial, point toward ethno-cultural 
"regeneration" through violence, and catabolically eat its body piece by 
piece in order to survive.

Like a hostage-taker with a bomb strapped to its chest, capital demands 
our acquiescence or it will hit the self-destruct button on Spaceship 
Earth. But its threats are hollow -- capital is not greater than life; 
it will never subsume it entirely under its will. It might dream of Mars 
and Nanobots for new frontiers of commodification, but all it has left 
to hawk are bunkers.

The dire threat of the First Extermination opens a horizon of 
possibility to finally destroy what has precipitated it -- the rule of 
capital. The First Extermination Event is not the history of some 
unstoppable "common ruin of the contending classes," nor is there any 
inevitability to its final outcome.

The indulgence of a fashionable posture of "apocalyptic chic," the 
lamentation of learning "how to die in the Anthropocene," or other such 
maudlin navel-gazing elegies for "civilization" (which means "Western 
civilization" because, of course, its collapse is all that matters) -- 
all this kind of literature on our ecological crisis is the greatest 
victory for the ideology of necrotic capital today.

Focusing on a dystopic future allows the privileged to ignore the 
dystopic horror that already exists today for a great many people on 
this planet. As philosopher and environmental activist Kyle Powys Whyte 
writes, many Indigenous peoples have long lived in a dystopian 
"Anthropocene" -- it is here, now, yesterday. They have also long fought 
an existential war against it.

The great historical struggle against capital's First Extermination has 
been, and remains, the struggle for land and the rights of the commons. 
Indigenous nations account for less than 5 percent of the global 
population while protecting 80 percent of its biodiversity. Indigenous 
Water and Land Protectors, whose campaigns are often led by women, face 
a far higher rate of assassinations and state violence compared to 
non-Indigenous activists in the Global North. From the Lenca people's 
victory in halting the Agua Zarca hydrodam on the Rio Gualcarque, to the 
Lumad's fight in the Philippines against the expulsion from their 
ancestral homes for mining, Indigenous peoples are on the front lines of 
the war against necrotic capital.

It is their struggles that created the theory and praxis of fighting the 
First Extermination Event. Any "Extinction Rebellion" must follow their 
lead.
https://truthout.org/articles/this-is-not-the-sixth-extinction-its-the-first-extermination-event/


[Recent history]
*All Was Quiet at the Birmingham Weather Office. Until a Trump Forecast 
Brought a Storm.*
Tornadoes are the most challenging tempests that the National Weather 
Service workers in Alabama typically handle. But all that changed with a 
faulty Hurricane Dorian tweet by the president...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/us/birmingham-national-weather-service-dorian.html



*This Day in Climate History - September 16, - from D.R. Tucker*
September 16, 2009: On MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," former 
fundamentalist Christian Frank Schaeffer explains right-wing science denial:

"…[T]he mainstream--not just media, but culture—doesn’t sufficiently 
take stock of the fact that within our culture we have a subculture 
which is literally a fifth column of insanity that is bred from birth, 
through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to 
reject facts as a matter of faith… [W]hat we‘re really talking about is 
a group of people that are resentful because they‘ve been left behind by 
modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature.  The rest of 
us are getting on with our lives. These people are standing on the 
hilltop waiting for the end."

Further, Schaeffer noted:
"You don‘t work to move them off this position.  You move past them.  
Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village 
idiot.  It‘s as simple as that.  And we have to understand, we have a 
village idiot in this country, it‘s called ‘Fundamentalist Christianity.’

"And until we move past these people—and let me add, as a former 
lifelong Republican, until the Republican leadership has the guts to 
stand up and say it would be better not to have a Republican Party than 
have a party that caters to the village idiot—there’s going to be no end 
in sight…

"There is no end to this stuff.  Why?  Because this subculture has as 
its fundamentalist faith that they distrust facts per se.  They believe 
in a young Earth, 6,000 years old, with dinosaurs cavorting with human 
beings.  They think that whether it‘s economic news or news from the 
Middle East, it all has to do with the end of time and Christ’s return.  
This is la-la land.

"And the Republican Party is totally enthralled to this subculture to 
the extent that there is no Republican Party.  There is a fundamentalist 
subculture which has become a cult.  It‘s fed red meat by buffoons like 
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other people who are just not terribly 
bright themselves and they are talking to even stupider people.  That‘s 
where we’re at.  That‘s where all of this is coming from.

"And it‘s becoming circular.  It‘s becoming a joke.  Unfortunately, a 
dangerous joke because once in a while, one of these ‘looney tunes,’ as 
we see, brings guns to public meetings.  Who knows what they do next.  
It‘s a serious thing we all have to face, but the Democrats and sane 
Americans just have to move past these people, say, ‘Go wait on the 
hilltop until the end, the rest of us are going to get on with 
rebuilding our country.’"

He concluded:
"Look, in the year 2000 I worked for John McCain, to try to get him 
elected in the primaries instead of George Bush.  But John McCain sold 
out by nominating Sarah Palin who comes directly from the heart of this 
movement and carries with her all that baggage.  So, he sold out.  I 
don‘t see anybody on the Republican side of things these days who has 
the moral standing to provide real leadership, or who will risk their 
position to do so."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IaAsBjoaj8
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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