[TheClimate.Vote] February 4, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 4, 2020*/

[NYTimes - Japan is acting backwards]
*Japan Races to Build New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite the Climate 
Risks*
By Hiroko Tabuchi
Ms. Tabuchi went to Yokosuka, Japan, to examine a controversial decision 
to invest heavily in coal.
It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster 
almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear 
power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning 
power plants -- one of the dirtiest sources of electricity -- at 17 
different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world 
needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming...
- - -
Together the 22 power plants would emit almost as much carbon dioxide 
annually as all the passenger cars sold each year in the United States. 
The construction stands in contrast with Japan's effort to portray this 
summer's Olympic Games in Tokyo as one of the greenest ever...
- - -
But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation 
needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually 
reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more 
than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030...
- - -
Scientists have registered a rise in the temperature of waters off Tokyo 
of more than 1 degree Celsius over the past decade, which is wreaking 
havoc with fish stocks there.

Mr. Komatsubara can feel the rise in water temperatures on his skin, he 
said, and was worried the new plants would be another blow to a fishing 
business already on the decline. "They say temperatures are rising. 
We've known that for a long time," Mr. Komatsubara said. "It's time to 
do something about that."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html


[Bernie and Joe battling about climate science]
*Climate scientists are not priests or prophets*
Assessing climate policy requires much more than science.

By David Roberts - Feb 3, 2020
Speaking to a voter at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, former 
Vice President Joe Biden said of Sen. Bernie Sanders's climate change 
plan: "Not a single solitary scientist thinks it can work."

Less than a week later, the Sanders campaign released a statement signed 
by 57 science professors and researchers across the country, declaring 
that his plan "is not only possible, but it must be done if we want to 
save the planet for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future 
generations."

The plan's policies, the letter says, "are realistic, necessary, and 
backed by science."...
- - -
*Scientists cannot solve the crisis of authority*
It increasingly seems that the US is composed of two warring tribes that 
lack a shared body of facts or any shared sources of authority. 
Consequently, they are unable to communicate or persuade one another of 
anything.

This gridlock benefits the party of the status quo -- the GOP 
demographic that has a hold on power far beyond its shrinking numbers -- 
but it is disastrous for climate change. It understandably has climate 
hawks in a state of high anxiety, casting about for anything that might 
break through the paralysis.

That urgency pushes them to reach for science, one of the few sources of 
authority that retains any cross-cultural power, more often than is 
healthy. They are loading more on climate science than it is meant to bear.

Whatever their differences on policy, Biden and Sanders are both guilty 
of this, wielding science like some sort of scepter that can grant or 
deny credibility on climate change. It's a poor substitute for the 
debates they ought to be having over political strategy, priorities, and 
policy design.

All politicians and reformers should be informed and bound by science -- 
no small caveat, given the fantasyland in which the GOP dwells these 
days -- but science will always under-determine what they can or should 
do. They will need a moral and prudential case that is convincing on its 
own terms.
Preventing immense suffering and transitioning to a healthier and more 
equitable society are not scientific goals. But they are worthy goals 
nonetheless.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/2/3/21116369/climate-change-scientists-policy-bernie-sanders-joe-biden


[Opinion from Paul Krugman invents the word "zombification"]
*How Zombies Ate the G.O.P.'s Soul*
Everyone with principles has left the party.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist - Feb. 3, 2020
Is this the week American democracy dies? Quite possibly.

After all, everyone in Washington understands perfectly well that Donald 
Trump abused the powers of his office in an attempt to rig this year's 
presidential election. But Senate Republicans are nonetheless about to 
acquit him without even pretending to look at the evidence, thereby 
encouraging further abuses of power.

But how did we get to this point? Part of the answer is extreme 
partisanship and right-wing political correctness (which is far more 
virulent than anything on the left). But I also blame the zombies.

A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved 
false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, 
eating people's brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the 
assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves -- a claim that has been 
proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other 
zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large 
role in our political discourse.

And all of the really important zombies these days are on the right. 
Indeed, they have taken over the Republican Party.

It was not always thus. Back in 1980 George H.W. Bush called Ronald 
Reagan's extravagant claims about the effectiveness of tax cuts "voodoo 
economic policy." Everything that has happened since has vindicated his 
original assessment. Deficits ballooned after Reagan cut taxes; they 
shrank and eventually turned into surpluses after Bill Clinton raised 
taxes, then ballooned again after George W. Bush's tax cuts.

Voodoo has also crashed and burned at the state level: The Kansas 
experiment in radical tax cuts was a dismal failure, while California's 
tax hike under Jerry Brown, which conservatives declared a case of 
"economic suicide," was followed by a revenue and economic boom.

Yet voodoo economics has become unchallengeable doctrine within the 
Republican Party. Even fake moderates like Susan Collins justified their 
support for the 2017 Trump tax cut by claiming that it would reduce the 
budget deficit. Predictably, the deficit actually exploded, and now 
exceeds $1 trillion a year.

The politics of climate change have followed a similar trajectory. 
Global temperature keeps setting records, while climate-related 
catastrophes like the Australian wildfires are proliferating. Yet a 
majority of Republicans in Congress are climate deniers -- many of them 
buying into the notion that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a 
vast international scientific conspiracy -- and even those, like Marco 
Rubio, who grudgingly admit that global warming is real oppose any 
significant action to limit emissions.

It's important to realize that the zombification of the G.O.P. isn't a 
recent phenomenon, something that happened only with Trump's election. 
On the contrary, zombies have been eating Republican brains for decades. 
Voodoo economics had completely taken over the party by the early 2000s, 
when then-House majority leader Tom DeLay declared, "Nothing is more 
important in the face of war than cutting taxes." Climate deniers have 
ruled since at least 2009, when only eight House Republicans supported a 
bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

What recent events make clear, however, is that zombie ideas haven't 
eaten just Republicans' brains. They have also eaten the party's soul.

Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be 
considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge 
allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she 
must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence.

It takes a certain kind of person to play that kind of game -- namely, a 
cynical careerist. There used to be Republican politicians who were more 
than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at 
this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may 
well have been the last of his kind.

What's left now is a party that, as far as I can tell, contains no 
politicians of principle; anyone who does have principles has been 
driven out.

Now, the news media, with its constant urge to seem "balanced," has a 
hard time coping with this reality; it's always looking for ways to 
portray at least some Republicans as admirable figures. This has made it 
easy prey for charlatans like Paul Ryan, who pretended to be serious 
about his fiscal principles. But he was always an obvious flimflam man.

Anyway, a result of decades of zombification is a Republican caucus that 
consists entirely of soulless opportunists (and no, the fact that some 
of them like to quote Scripture doesn't change that fact).

I guess you might have hoped that there would be some limits to what 
these apparatchiks would accept, that even they would draw the line at 
gross abuses of power and collusion with foreign autocrats. What we've 
learned, however -- and perhaps more important, what Trump has learned 
-- is that there is no line. If Trump wants to dismantle democracy and 
rule of law (which he does), his party will stand with him all the way.

Here's our email: letters at nytimes.com.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a 
Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate 
Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 
his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/republican-party-trump.html

- - -

[The answer is no]
*Are Republicans coming out of 'the closet' on climate change?*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/can-republicans-turn-over-a-new-leaf-on-climate-change/2020/02/03/6a6a6bd8-4155-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html


[Eminent climate scientist speaks]
*Climate Models vs. Real World*
03 February 2020
James Hansen
Scientific references are included in the PDF version of this paper on 
our website. 
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_ModelsVsWorld.pdf

Climate models are most useful when used so as to help us understand 
climate mechanisms in the real world, and thus improve our ability to 
understand ongoing and future climate change.

Comparison of climate model predictions against real world outcome 
provides one way to gain improved understanding.  There is recent 
discussion in the media of early predictions of human-caused global 
warming, including simulations made with early climate models at the 
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), specifically (1) 1981 paper 
in Science that used a simple one-dimensional (1-D) column climate 
model, and (2) 1988 paper in JGR that used our first coarse-resolution 
3-D climate model.  The media discussions miss the most important 
lessons. The 1981 model did a pretty good job, slightly underpredicting 
global warming...
more at - https://mailchi.mp/caa/climate-models-vs-real-world?e=c4e20a3850
- - -
[clip from the PDF chapter 17:]
*Charney's Puzzle: Is Earth Sensitive?*
[W]e believe it quite possible that the capacity of the intermediate 
waters of the oceans to absorb heat could delay the estimated warming by 
several
decades.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iTe2y11YKuPLZIw1Rk8-knWPpIPfWHii/view
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_ModelsVsWorld.pdf
- - -
[from Wikipedia]
*Jule Gregory Charney (January 1, 1917 – June 16, 1981)* was an American 
meteorologist who played an important role in developing numerical 
weather prediction and increasing understanding of the general 
circulation of the atmosphere by devising a series of increasingly 
sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere. His work was the 
driving force behind many national and international weather initiatives 
and programs.

Considered the father of modern dynamical meteorology, Charney is 
credited with having "guided the postwar evolution of modern meteorology 
more than any other living figure." Charney's work also influenced that 
of his close colleague Edward Lorenz, who explored the limitations of 
predictability and was a pioneer of the field of chaos theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jule_Gregory_Charney


[problems in ancient land]
*In Afghanistan, climate change complicates future prospects for peace*
Experts say warming will further fuel natural disasters, mass 
displacement, child marriage, and conflict.
- - -
Early warning systems have been developed in order to better warn 
communities of impending natural disasters. Wells and water systems have 
been dug and installed in remote areas. Awareness, too, has increased 
about climate change and the threat it poses to national security.
In September, despite near-daily terrorist attacks in the capital and 
across the country, dozens of young Afghans--many of them women--took to 
the streets in Kabul demanding that attention be paid to climate change. 
Guarded by Afghan security forces holding Kalashnikov rifles, the 
protestors held up banners and donned face masks protecting their mouths 
and noses from the polluted air, thick with smoke billowing from the 
exhaust pipes of Soviet-era vehicles and coal-burning stoves. "Stop 
denying, our world is dying," read one sign held up by a young man.
- - -
In Herat, the camps housing Fatemeh and thousands of others have lost 
most of their emergency funding in recent months. That means largely no 
more food or water distribution, or education programs, which has led to 
increased rates of child marriage and begging. Funders say the situation 
is no longer an "emergency" because the drought is over and people, in 
theory, could return home.

Just down the road, another sprawling camp filled with Afghans who fled 
previous droughts and conflict has turned into a permanent, impoverished 
town. They, like Fatemeh, don't plan to return home.

Sitting inside her family's tent, its sides rippling against whooshes of 
hot, sandy wind, Fatemeh thinks back to her own brief childhood in 
Badghis, wading through golden fields of wheat up to her knees. There, 
she laughed and played with friends as the cattle grazed nearby.

"We were free," Fatemeh says, holding the tiny hand of her daughter, 
Fariba, tightly. "I want my daughter to have that same feeling."

Unless something changes drastically--and soon--Fariba will grow up in a 
wasteland dotted by plastic tents, next to a dry, cracked riverbed that 
offers no relief. When she begins menstruating, she'll pay off her 
family's debt by marrying the son of the man who loaned her family 
money. They may have survived the drought, but it has most certainly 
cost Fariba her freedom.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/afghan-struggles-to-rebuild-climate-change-complicates/


[observation of tipping points]
*Permafrost Is Thawing So Fast, It's Gouging Holes in the Arctic*
MATT SIMON - SCIENCE 02.03.2020
Normally, these terrains of frozen soil thaw gradually. But in some 
places, it's thawing so abruptly that landscapes are collapsing in on 
themselves.
It's perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback 
loops: As the planet warms, permafrost--landscapes of frozen soil and 
rock--begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, 
releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, 
more thawing, and even more carbon emissions.

But here's something you've probably never heard of, and it's something 
not even the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has really 
considered: thermokarst. That's the land that gets ravaged whenever 
permafrost thaws rapidly. As the ice that holds the soil together 
disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up. Climate 
scientists have been working gradual permafrost thaw into their 
models--changes that run centimeters deep over decades or centuries. But 
abrupt permafrost thaw happens on the scale of meters over months or 
years. That shocks the surrounding landscape into releasing potentially 
even more carbon than would have if it thawed at a more leisurely pace.

Today in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers argue that without 
taking abrupt thaws into account, we're underestimating the impact of 
permafrost thaw by 50 percent. "The amount of carbon coming off that 
very narrow amount of abrupt thaw in the landscape, that small area, is 
still large enough to double the climate consequences and the permafrost 
carbon feedback," says study lead author Merritt Turetsky, of the 
University of Guelph and University of Colorado Boulder.

Less than 20 percent of northern permafrost land is susceptible to this 
kind of rapid thaw. Some permafrost is simply frozen rock, or even sand. 
But the kind we're worried about here contains a whole lot of water. 
"Where permafrost tends to be lake sediment or organic soils, the type 
of earth material that can hold a lot of water, these are like sponges 
on the landscape," says Turetsky. "When you have thaw, we see really 
dynamic and rapid changes."

That's because frozen water takes up more space than liquid water. When 
permafrost thaws, it loses a good amount of its volume. Think of it like 
thawing ice cubes made of water and muck: If you defrost the tray, the 
greenery will sink to the bottom and settle. "That's exactly what 
happens in these ecosystems when the permafrost has a lot of ice in it 
and it thaws," says Turetsky. "Whatever was at the surface just slumps 
right down to the bottom. So you get these pits on the land, sometimes 
meters deep. They're like sinkholes developing in the land."

"Essentially, we're taking terra firma and making it terra soupy," 
Turetsky adds.
- - -
When these lands thaw, they play host to a number of processes. As ice 
turns to liquid water, trees flood and die off. Thus more light reaches 
the soil, further accelerating thawing. This is in contrast to gradual 
thaw, when the plant community largely stays the same as the ice thaws. 
Defrosted soil at the surface gets thicker and thicker, but it doesn't 
catastrophically collapse...
- - -
  These northern forests have recently seen an unprecedented number of 
wildfires. "Much of the boreal forest burns more and more often, and 
when the ecosystem burns, it can actually accelerate the permafrost 
thaw," says David Olefeldt of University of Alberta, coauthor on the 
paper. Without cover from these trees to shade it, the soil warms ever 
more intensely...
- - -
"With abrupt thaw, you're exposing deeper layers to much warmer 
temperatures, and deep layers in permafrost can contain very high 
amounts of carbon," Schaedel says...
- - -
And it's something that needs far more research. Any climate modeling 
comes with inherent uncertainties--there's no way to perfectly represent 
such complex systems. The uncertainty here is projecting how much land 
might succumb to abrupt thawing, says University of Alaska Fairbanks 
permafrost geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky, who wasn't involved in the 
work. Scientists have only begun to study these rapid thaw events, which 
often happen at extremely small scales...
more at - https://www.wired.com/story/abrupt-permafrost-thaw/
- - -
[source]
*Carbon release through abrupt permafrost thaw*
Abstract
The permafrost zone is expected to be a substantial carbon source to the 
atmosphere, yet large-scale models currently only simulate gradual 
changes in seasonally thawed soil. Abrupt thaw will probably occur in 
<20% of the permafrost zone but could affect half of permafrost carbon 
through collapsing ground, rapid erosion and landslides. Here, we 
synthesize the best available information and develop inventory models 
to simulate abrupt thaw impacts on permafrost carbon balance. Emissions 
across 2.5 million km2 of abrupt thaw could provide a similar climate 
feedback as gradual thaw emissions from the entire 18 million km2 
permafrost region under the warming projection of Representative 
Concentration Pathway 8.5. While models forecast that gradual thaw may 
lead to net ecosystem carbon uptake under projections of Representative 
Concentration Pathway 4.5, abrupt thaw emissions are likely to offset 
this potential carbon sink. Active hillslope erosional features will 
occupy 3% of abrupt thaw terrain by 2300 but emit one-third of abrupt 
thaw carbon losses. Thaw lakes and wetlands are methane hot spots but 
their carbon release is partially offset by slowly regrowing vegetation. 
After considering abrupt thaw stabilization, lake drainage and soil 
carbon uptake by vegetation regrowth, we conclude that models 
considering only gradual permafrost thaw are substantially 
underestimating carbon emissions from thawing permafrost.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0526-0


[News information battles in Australia]
*A journalist's view of The Australian's anti-science campaign, changes 
in energy and transport, and a boost for innovation.*
By Robyn Williams on The Science Show
Duration: 54min 4sec
Broadcast: Sat 1 Feb 2020, 12:05pm
Download https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2020/02/ssw_20200201.mp3
Leigh Dayton was Science Writer at The Australian newspaper from 2002 to 
2012. She suggests her acceptance of climate science was part of the 
reason her career with the newspaper ended. Here she shares her view of 
when and why The Australian developed its anti-science stance and its 
rejection of climate science and the role of humans in our changing climate.
Broadcast: Sat 1 Feb 2020
Play stream -
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/a-journalist%E2%80%99s-view-of-the-australian%E2%80%99s-anti-science-campaign,/11918362



[Cli-Fi publishing]
*Climate Fiction for Climate Action*
An interview with Maja Lunde, author of 'The End of the Ocean.'
BY AMY BRADY - JANUARY 21, 2020
The End of the Ocean is Norwegian author Maja Lunde's second in a 
quartet of novels about how climate change and ecological destruction is 
reshaping the planet and human life as we know it. Like the first novel 
in the series, A History of Bees, this glittering book follows multiple 
generations.

In the present day we meet Signe, a seventy-year-old woman who's 
traversing the ocean in only a sailboat, seeking to reconnect with the 
love of her life. Flash forward twenty some years, and we meet two other 
people who are sailing the ocean for a very different reason: David, and 
his daughter, Lou, are refugees fleeing from a climate-ravaged Southern 
Europe. Their homeland has wilted in drought and become fractured by 
war. On their journey they discover Signe's ancient sailboat, and their 
respective journeys become entwined in ways that no one could have 
predicted.

The novel (translated by Diane Oatley) is beautifully written but also a 
call for climate action. I spoke with Lunde about what inspired her 
novels, her thoughts on the climate crisis more generally, and what she 
sees as the power of fiction to inspire readers to think more deeply 
about climate change.

Amy Brady
Like your previous novel, The History of Bees, this novel unfolds along 
multiple time lines. What is it that draws you to multi-generational 
story telling?

Maja Lunde
I write about nature and people, about connections, about the outcome of 
our actions. To work on a broad canvas when it comes to both time and 
place feels right. That said, the writing process is intuitive. In the 
beginning I didn't even know [the story told in The History of Bees] 
would be four books. As I was writing it, several other stories kept 
buzzing around in my head, all of them about people living close to 
nature, many of them affected by environmental change. Like Signe, an 
old woman growing up by the foot of a waterfall in Norway. Or David, a 
young climate refugee in southern France, and Nicolai, a Russian zoo 
manager.

Suddenly I realized they were all part of the same story, that even 
though The History of Bees was almost done, I was not done. My 
characters, my stories were all pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle, and there 
had to be four books. A quartet. Each book can be read separately, but 
for readers who have the patience to read all four, a bigger picture 
will hopefully appear. In the last book I'll try to connect all the 
stories, and the main story line will be set in 2110, that is 12 years 
after the future story in The History of Bees. While the first book had 
insects as a main theme, the second had water and global warming, and 
the third animals, the fourth will have plants, seed, and everything 
that grows.

Amy Brady
Do you think about the climate crisis beyond what you write about in 
your fiction?

Maja Lunde
In part, The End of the Ocean was written out of gratitude. Being 
Norwegian means being able to live surrounded by water in any form, wild 
waterfalls and tranquil lakes, majestic glaciers and pristine snow, and 
of course the fjords and the ocean. It also means being able to turn on 
the tap and fill a glass of fresh, clean drinking water. This is a true 
miracle. But a miracle available to very few, and ever fewer. Our 
freshwater resources are emptied, the glaciers are melting before our 
eyes, while the world is getting drier and warmer every year. Therefore, 
the novel also originates from my own anxiety. In Norway we say "write 
where it burns." This is where it burns for me.

Amy Brady
The End of the Ocean focuses on two people–a father and his small 
daughter–who are refugees from a war-torn and climate change-impacted 
nation. Whereas many novels focused on climate change center around the 
most privileged, yours focuses on refugees. What inspired you to create 
David and Lou?

Maja Lunde
The story started with an image of a young man walking alone in a 
drought ridden southern Europe some time in our close future. I knew he 
was alone, I knew he had lost everything. And then I saw him finding a 
boat in a deserted garden. He interested me, his loneliness. I wanted to 
know more about him. Where did he come from, what had happened to him, 
and what about the boat? Then I realized he had a daughter, and then 
that his story was somehow connected to Signe's.

Amy Brady
Singe is also a beautifully written character. Where did she come from? 
Is she inspired by anyone you know in real life?

Maja Lunde
Signe is my mother's age and inspired by that generation. But, like most 
of my characters, she is fiction. As with David, her story started with 
a picture, an idea of an elderly woman standing by a waterfall, being 
angry and passionate about the river. I wanted to know more about her 
too. And when I realized her story was connected to the waterfall, and 
the glacier it ran from, I also realized she had a boat. And that water, 
the element, was running through both these stories, connecting them.

The story about the glacier, on the other hand, is based on true events. 
There is a firm in Norway called Svaice. They have tried for several 
years to exploit the glacier Svartisen in the exact same way as I 
describe in my novel, in order to sell ice cubes to high-end bars on the 
other side of the globe. When I first read about it, I was not sure if I 
could use it in my story. It felt too much like fiction, like something 
a novelist would make up, to show the reader all the crazy things we do 
with nature. I still decided to go with it.

The story for me is both very concrete, but also symbolic. Cutting out 
ice from a dying glacier is a brutal and strong image. It is also what 
starts the story for my main character Signe. She loves the glacier and 
it resembles everything that connects her to her childhood, and to 
Magnus, the love of her life. Now he is the one in charge of the 
exploitation. This strengthens her fury, both towards the man she loved, 
and towards her own generation.

Amy Brady
What power does fiction have over readers on the topic of climate 
change? Can it influence them to think differently? To take action? Or 
maybe there's another effect it has on readers?

Maja Lunde
Fiction talks to our feelings. When we read fiction, we are in the 
story, we feel what the characters feel, we learn what they learn. While 
reports and journalism talk to our heads, fiction talks to our hearts. 
And to be willing to change, to do what is needed, I think we need deep 
engagement, we need our feelings.

My writing starts with feelings. Never with a message. I think about the 
story and the characters; I want to be true to them, to feel that they 
are alive. I don't have all the answers, only a lot of questions. Why is 
it the human being that rules the world? What separates humans from 
animals, and what links us to them? And most important, do we have it in 
us to make the changes that are needed? I still think the answer to that 
last question is yes. We are able to do so much when we work together, 
our ability to cooperate and communicate across borders is fantastic. 
But I don't know … Sometimes it's hard to be hopeful.

Amy Brady
What's next for you? Any other projects (or book tours!) that you'd like 
my readers to know about?

Maja Lunde
The next book will be about endangered species. In this book readers 
will meet one of the characters from The End of the Ocean again and see 
how the books are all connected. As I said, I see this as a big jigsaw 
puzzle, with many pieces that all are connected and is one story. Just 
like the world.

FICTION
*The End of the Ocean*
By Maja Lunde; translated by translated by Diane Oatley
Published January 14, 2020
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2020/01/21/the-end-of-the-ocean/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 4, 1992 *

In one of the worst examples of mainstream media
false-balance in US history, Ted Koppel hosts a "debate" on ABC's
"Nightline" between Sen. Al Gore (D-TN) and Rush Limbaugh on global
warming and other environmental issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9rZKJt4ZC4 (Part 1)
http://youtu.be/WbC-yWycHfM (Part 2)


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