[TheClimate.Vote] June 11, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Jun 11 11:06:31 EDT 2020
/*June 11, 2020*/
[64 photos from CBS News]
*Stunning photos of climate change*
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/climate-change-photos/
[Flying industry refuses to die]
*'Final blow' to aviation climate plan as EU agrees to weaken rules*
09/06/2020
EU member states will back an industry proposal to reduce airlines'
climate obligations in response to the coronavirus pandemic, at the UN
aviation forum
By Chloe Farand
The climate plan for aviation is losing its last shred of credibility,
after the European Union confirmed it will back an industry proposal to
water down the rules, campaigners have warned.
In the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic, the International Air
Transport Association (Iata), called on the UN body responsible for
aviation to ease airlines' obligations to offset their emissions growth
under a scheme known as Corsia...
- -
Member states of Icao have agreed to offset all growth in aviation
emissions from 2020. With few technological solutions currently
available to reduce planes' pollution, airlines were expected to fund
emissions cuts in other sectors, under a carbon market called Corsia.
The agreed baseline for measuring emissions was to be the two-year
average across 2019 and 2020. But with 2020 turning into a year of
anomalously low air travel because of restrictions to contain the spread
of Covid-19, airlines have proposed to measure from pre-pandemic levels
in 2019.
Analysis by the Oko-Institut in Germany found that changing the
baseline to 2019 could give airlines a free pass to pollute for the next
three to six years depending on the speed of the recovery. A study by
the US-based Environmental Defense Fund found similar results.
Observers to the UN aviation talks argue the baseline change isn't
needed because offsets are already very cheap. An existing flexibility
provision built in Corsia could be used by airlines to delay their
offsetting obligations and limit additional financial costs...
- -
Airlines have managed to get what they wanted from governments, Dufrasne
added. Governments, including in the EU, are handing out multi-billion
relief packages to airlines "with virtually no climate conditions while
also agreeing to industry demands to weaken the already insufficient
climate policies in place," he said. "They are exploiting the crisis."..
- -
If a decision was taken by the council, "this will deal a triple whammy"
to Icao's climate credibility, she told CHN: airlines will be given a
free pass to pollute, the trust of countries that are not part of Icao's
council will be undermined as well as the public trust in the
credibility of airlines' environmental claims.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/06/09/final-blow-aviation-climate-plan-eu-agrees-weaken-rules/
[charged about electric cars - video 16 mins]
*Top ten reasons NOT to buy an electric vehicle (and why each one is
wrong!)*
Just Have a Think
Electric vehicles. To buy or not to buy? That is the question! Many of
us still labour under prejudices and misperceptions that are years or
even decades out of date. Misperceptions that are enthusiastically
reinforced by the fossil fuel industry! But with battery prices tumbling
and governments around the world now beginning to enact legislation to
ban the sale of internal combustion engine cars in the next few years,
all the major manufacturers are investing billions in research and
development to bring us some spectacular electric choices. In fact
there's never been a better time to have a think about EVs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyZOLMeMYnI
[Strong opinions from a military mindset]
BY CAITLIN WERRELL AND FRANCESCO FEMIA IN CLIMATE AND SECURITY ON JUNE
10, 2020
*Climate Change Entails More Than Changing Temperatures: Disease and
Security Implications*
By Leah Emanuel
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew Vollrath, a journalism
Master's student at Stanford, has created a podcast entitled "Life in
the Coronaverse." This five-part series explores the linkages between
the coronavirus and climate change, how we respond to both, the partisan
divides impacting action, and more. In the third episode, published on
May 29, Vollrath spoke with Stanford physician Desiree LaBeaud and
Center for Climate and Security's Senior Strategist Sherri Goodman about
the global health and security impacts that climate change can have.
While there are no known direct links between climate change and COVID,
LaBeaud said, we will like likely see an increase in the spread of
vector-borne diseases as climate change intensifies. Vector-borne
diseases are diseases that are transmitted to humans through insects or
animals, such as Malaria and Zika. As temperatures increase, LaBeaud
said, these species will be able to survive in countries and regions in
which they previously could not. Since these places will have never seen
diseases of this nature, the populations are particularly susceptible.
This will result in outbreaks similar to that of COVID-19, which
presents the risk of overwhelming the healthcare system. There is a lot
of potential for a lot of future pandemics, LaBeaud said.
However, the spread of infectious diseases is far from the only
peripheral impact of climate change. Following LaBeaud, Vollrath spoke
with Goodman to understand the security impacts of climate change.
Goodman spoke about how climate change is a "threat multiplier," a
phrase that was first used by Goodman and her colleagues in a 2007
report. This term directly references the military term "force
multiplier," which is something that makes weapon systems more
effective. As a "threat multiplier," climate change can drastically
increase the power of a range of dangers. These threats, Goodman said,
are already here. The largest United States naval base located in
Norfolk, Virginia, is not only sinking, but is highly at risk for the
next hurricane on the east coast. Additionally, the melting of the
arctic has created a whole new avenue for geopolitical competition, with
several countries already competing for control over this new sea route.
However, an especially alarming past impact, Goodman said, is the link
between climate change and the Syrian conflict - an issue analyzed by
the Center for Climate and Security's Caitlin Werrell, Francesco Femia
and Troy Sterberg beginning in 2012. This conflict was preceded by
prolonged drought in Syria, considered to have been made more likely by
climate change, which forced many rural citizens to migrate, including
towards the cities. This placed strain on available food, water, and
jobs, which contributed to civil unrest. Political forces then took
advantage of this unrest, leading to the deadliest modern conflict.
Goodman said that political forces or terrorist organizations taking
advantage of vulnerable populations due to climate impacts will likely
become a pattern. Recognizing these extreme effects, Goodman said the
United States military continues to take climate change very seriously
despite the slow action within other governmental sectors.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2020/06/10/climate-change-entails-more-than-changing-temperatures-disease-and-security-implications/
[Two greats leave Weather Underground - head to Yale Climate Connections]
*Jeff Masters, Bob Henson to post regularly for YCC*
Two respected meteorologists to provide regular analyses, commentary,
insights on extreme weather and climate change issues.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/jeff-masters-bob-henson-to-post-regularly-for-ycc/
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/end-of-an-era-category-6-to-close-shop-this-month
[for a destabilizing world, all chaos is related - clips from a long
article]
*The protests, the pandemic, and the planet: from systemic decline to
civilizational renewal*
Nafeez Ahmed
Jun 5, 2020
The US is on the brink of becoming a racist failed state. It is no
accident that this terrible moment arrives in the midst of a global
pandemic; an escalating economic crisis; an oil sector meltdown. This is
a perfect storm of simultaneous, complex crises. How did we get here?
How do we solve this?
If we're not confused, perplexed and alarmed about this intensifying
sequence of overlapping crises, we are not paying attention.
It's time to start paying attention. Right now: We, the human species,
stand at the dawn of a great civilizational inflection point. This is
the fork in the road. The decisions we, you, make in this moment are
about to make history.
The convergence of events we are witnessing is a symptom of a wider
process of global systemic decline. This convergence is happening due to
the unsustainable nature of a system that can no longer keep going in
its current form without sparking further crisis. The ultimate hidden
driver is a way of living and being premised on self-maximization
through plunder of the 'Other': whether Others are different humans,
different species, or the planet itself...
- - -
The pandemic has wrought a perfect storm of disease, violence and
poverty onto Black and minority communities across the Western world,
amplifying problems they were already facing. In doing so, the murder of
George Floyd was a catalyst, a match to long-burning flames, tipping
over a declining system into a spiral of chaos.
But this perfect storm of structural racism, effectively weaponized by
the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot simply be removed with platitudes of
support, affinity and allegiance, or goodwill gestures of solidarity. We
have to start by recognizing this structural racism for what it is --
the extension and legacy of a global imperial system, premised on
ecological plunder: A system of accelerating resource extraction and
wealth centralization premised on imperial violence that is literally
destroying the ecosystems on which all life on Earth depends.
- -
The systemic enslavement of Africans was integral to the emergence of
the global economy as we know it. It was part of a trans-Atlantic
emerging capitalist world system, designed to establish a labour force
for the expansion of plantations across colonial America, which fuelled
Britain's industries and helped augment the processes behind the
Industrial Revolution.
The acceleration of slavery also coincides with the dawn of the age of
the 'Anthropocene', what some scientists consider to be an entirely new
geological era characterized by the predominant impact of human
activities on the Earth's geological processes. British geographers
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin put the pivotal date for the onset of this
new geological epoch at 1610. "This date marks the irreversible exchange
of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds", which
coincided with "an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured
in Antarctic ice cores."...
- -
The dawn of industrialization was, in turn, an inflection point for the
human species. It ushered in the age of fossil fuels -- oil, gas and
coal -- which enabled a bold new era of exponentially increasing
material throughput, fuelling a new paradigm of 'endless growth' economics.
This economic paradigm has widened income inequalities for more than 70
percent of the world population, even as it has also escalated the
destruction of natural ecosystems.
We have produced and consumed at rates equivalent to the exploitation of
two whole planets.
And worse, multiple warnings backed by a global consensus of climate
scientists have warned that human activities, through the escalating
consumption of fossil fuel resources, is destabilizing the Earth's
natural carbon cycle with potentially catastrophic consequences for al
life on the planet within our lifetimes...
- -
But since the Industrial Revolution, built on the back of empires --
enabled by the sinews of slavery -- human civilization has inexorably
expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the
way, and exponentially increasing associated carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions -- overwhelming the planet's capacity for absorption. The
result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures.
Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere,
capturing greater heat, is in turn playing havoc with the Earth's
climate, weather and ecological systems.
As human civilization continues its expansion, burning up escalating
quantities of fossil fuels along the way, the climate science community
warns that above a certain level of CO2, planetary ecosystems could
shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era -- one
outside the stable boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of
years, and certainly outside anything human beings have ever experienced.
Our civilization is on the brink, right now. A landmark study in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that at the
current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the
pre-industrial average, we are already breaching so many planetary
boundaries at such scale, that we could be at immediate risk of
triggering a cascade of runaway processes leading to an uninhabitable
planet. The complexity of these boundaries is such that we may not even
be able to detect whether these processes are in play until after the
fact. We just don't know...
- -
What we do know for sure is that if we continue on this pathway of
business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading
toward a 3 to 6 degrees Celsius global average temperature rise within
80 years. Even a 2C planet, to which at minimum we are already heading
within 16 years, should be considered "extremely dangerous" for human
societies; and a global average temperature rise within the 3-4C
threshold would probably create conditions that make the core
infrastructures of human civilization increasingly unviable.
The same process of relentless global industrial expansion laid the
conditions for the COVID-19 pandemic. As industrial activities have
grown exponentially, they have encroached increasingly onto wildlife and
natural habitats, forcing animals carrying tens of thousands of unknown
exotic diseases into closer interaction with human settlements. That's
why scientists have warned for decades that a pandemic would be
inevitable this century.
*Yet this very expanding global industrial system which is breaching
planetary boundaries and triggering increasingly dangerous disease
outbreaks is the legacy of colonial racism...*
- -
As industrial civilization continues on its relentless path of maximum
extraction, exploitation and centralization of resources, its power
centers continue to invent and entrench multiple ideological divides
between human beings, and between human beings and the natural world, to
justify its unequal power relations. And so, the devastating impacts of
the Earth system crisis remain racialized, with the worst consequences
disproportionately affecting poorer, darker peoples all over the world...
- -
We need to break the cycle. But we can't break what we refuse to see.
It's only by facing up to the mistaken choices we've made as a species,
by taking responsibility for who we are and what we've done, that we
might be able to step-up together and make different choices that can
convert this trajectory of systemic decline into a chance for
civilizational renewal. But to do so we must accept some humility,
recognize that we didn't see this coming, and know that this is because
our current way of seeing the world largely misses the true,
interconnected complexity of what's really going on.
The George Floyd protests follow on the back of a steady rise in the
frequency and intensity of protest events, political instability and
civil unrest, both in the US and around the world. They were preceded by
a rising tide of racism and white supremacism in the US, and
symbiotically interconnected with escalating political instabilities in
many other parts of the world, from the 2008 Occupy movements to the
2011 and 2018 Arab uprisings.
As I've shown in my scientific monograph, Failing States, Collapsing
Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer Energy
Briefs, 2017), this rising trend in political unrest correlates
intimately with the escalation in Earth system disruption: the
intensification of climate chaos, the diminishing returns from
ever-expanding resource extraction, the widening of structural
inequalities, and the increasingly complex intertwined impacts on food,
water, energy, and health systems.
Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political
Violence (SPRINGER BRIEFS IN…
https://www.academia.edu/34816514/Failing_States_Collapsing_Systems_BioPhysical_Triggers_of_Political_Violence_SPRINGER_BRIEFS_IN_ENERGY_
Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented
outbreak of social unrest in every major…
www.academia.edu...
- -
As we move toward this fourth stage in the last stages of the life cycle
of industrial civilization, the choices each of us make during the
global phase shift play an integral role in determining the structures,
values, behavioural patterns, and relationships of an emergent system,
which will then form the basis of a new systemic life cycle for human
civilization.
The decisions we make right now will plant the seeds for the task of
rebuilding, redesigning, and recreating the next life cycle for our species.
This has quite profound implications.
It means that many structures we see around us at this moment are
destined to disappear, one way or another. Many of them are already
experiencing interlocking, cascading failures. We need to accept the
demise of those systems which, through their own brittleness,
stubbornness, and narcissism, are incapable of change. There will be
terrible fallout from this process and we need to do all we can to
mitigate the impacts.
Simultaneously, we need to also cast our gaze ahead, toward what we need
to create, toward the new life-patterns we are being called to bring
into being, the new relationships, the new values.
We will need to bring forth all our creativity and wisdom; we will need
to do our best to stop thinking in silos, and to see the world in its
complex intersectionality; we will need to integrate our struggles in
unfamiliar ways, not just through public statements, but through new
institution-changing actions; we will need to reflect really deeply on
how changing and upgrading our perceptions translates into changing and
upgrading who we are and how we are, across all our relationships; and
we will need to roll up our sleeves and work together across multiple
sectors and systems to scale up how we can leverage that process to
create transformative conditions for the flourishing of life, by
challenging ourselves as well as challenging prevailing unequal,
destructive, narcissistic power structures, especially those within our
reach.
The Black Lives Matter eruption is the outcome of a civilizational
inflection point -- a point-of-no-return -- beyond which we face two
choices: escalating collapse, or systemic transformation. The imperial
system of structural racism and ecological plunder is crumbling beneath
the weight of its own diminishing returns. Where does your allegiance
belong? To that which is already doomed, or to an emerging life-world of
possibility?
Published by Insurge Intelligence, crowdfunding systems journalism for
the planetary emergency. Support us to report where others fear to tread.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is Executive Director of the System Shift Lab. He is an
award-winning investigative journalist, change strategist and systems
theorist. Nafeez is editor of the crowdfunded investigative journalism
platform, INSURGE intelligence, and 'system shift' columnist at VICE
where he reports on 'global system transformation'.
Published by Insurge Intelligence, crowdfunding systems journalism for
the planetary emergency.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 11, 2001 *
In a Rose Garden speech on climate change, President George W. Bush
repeatedly attacks the Kyoto Protocol.
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/GlobalClimateChang
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html
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