[✔️] April 15, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 15, 2021*/

[video commentary]
*Climate change : The daily consequences we're choosing to ignore.*
Apr 14, 2021
Just Have a Think
Climate change may still seem like a problem that we will have to deal 
with in a few decades time. But that's a long way from the truth. The 
consequences of climate change are already happening all over the world 
every day. Now a new paper has been published by the Lancet Countdown 
Project, tracking how those consequences have worsened over the last two 
decades.
Video Transcripts available at our website
http://www.justhaveathink.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fbsi3o0BbA



[Stefan Rahmsstorf is top researcher - this is an important academic 
video lecture]
*Climate Tipping Points*
Jan 4, 2021
Stefan Rahmstorf explains climate tipping points. An invited lecture for 
the 2020 online experience of the Chaos Computer Club, rC3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOb079cbIoM

- -

[classic article corrects 2020]
*Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against*
The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must 
compel political and economic action on emissions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0


[The Lancet Countdown]
VOLUME 397, ISSUE 10269, P129-170, JANUARY 09, 2021
*The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: 
responding to converging crises*
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32290-X/fulltext



[exhortation]
*The climate emergency is here. The media needs to act like it*
Ahead of Earth Day, the Guardian is partnering with newsrooms around the 
world in a joint initiative calling on journalists to treat the climate 
crisis like the emergency it is
April 12, 2021 -- [Guardian staff reports]
When the world shut down last year, there was one big beneficiary: the 
planet. With travel ground to a halt, emissions fell 10% in 2020. But we 
haven’t kept up the momentum – as economies reopen, carbon emissions are 
expected surpass pre-pandemic levels in the coming months, unless 
countries take urgent action.

We are in an emergency. California is on the brink of drought, prompting 
fears of a new wave of devastating megafires later this year. Rising 
temperatures could soon make the planet’s tropical regions unlivable for 
humans. Yet a Guardian investigation recently found that only a small 
number of major countries have been pumping rescue funds into a 
low-carbon future.

Two years ago, the Guardian announced it was changing the language it 
uses to talk about the environment, eschewing terms like “climate 
change” for the more appropriately urgent “climate emergency”. Today, we 
are joined by others in the news industry, organizations that recognize 
that a global catastrophe is already here, and that without immediate 
action, it will get unimaginably worse.

These organizations are part of Covering Climate Now, an initiative 
founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation, with the 
Guardian as the lead partner, to address the urgent need for stronger 
climate coverage. More than 400 newsrooms from around the world – with a 
combined audience nearing 2 billion people – have joined Covering 
Climate Now.

Ahead of Earth Day on 22 April, the Guardian, CCN and partners will 
elevate the climate crisis by publishing stories around the theme 
“Living through the climate emergency”. We will open our climate 
coverage for partners – some of whom don’t have dedicated climate 
reporters – to republish. And we will host a curated collection of 
climate stories from our partners on the Guardian’s website. That 
collection will live here.

To kick off the week, a number of outlets have joined together to 
declare what has long been evident: the climate emergency is here. Our 
statement is below. We invite all of our colleagues in the media 
industry to join us.

The planet is burning. It’s time for journalism to recognize that the 
climate emergency is here.

This is a statement of science, not politics.

Thousands of scientists – including James Hansen, the Nasa scientist who 
put the problem on the public agenda in 1988, and David King and Hans 
Schellnhuber, former science advisers to the British and German 
governments, respectively – have said humanity faces a “climate emergency”.

Why “emergency”? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, 
humanity must take action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of 
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, 
storms, wildfires and ice melt of 2020 routine and could “render a 
significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable”, warned a recent 
Scientific American article.

The media’s response to Covid-19 provides a useful model. Guided by 
science, journalists have described the pandemic as an emergency, 
chronicled its devastating impacts, called out disinformation, and told 
audiences how to protect themselves (with masks, for example).

We need the same commitment to the climate story. As partners in 
Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of hundreds of news outlets, 
we will present coverage in the lead-up to Earth Day, 22 April, around 
the theme “Living Through the Climate Emergency”. We invite journalists 
everywhere to join us.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/12/covering-climate-now-guardian-climate-emergency



[Disinformation studies from Peter Sinclair and Yale - video]
*The "Disinformation Ecosystem" Predates Trump Administration*
Apr 14, 2021
*YaleClimateConnections*
Decades ago, powerful companies began promoting misleading information 
about cigarette smoking and climate change, feeding public distrust of 
science, expertise, and institutions. One result: Americans don’t just 
disagree about politics, but also on “a fundamental universe of facts.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE-3IKocnFY



[Greenpeace publication]
*Fossil Fuel Racism*
How Phasing Out Oil, Gas, and Coal
Can Protect Communities
PUBLISHED: APRIL 13, 2021
www.greenpeace.org/usa/fossil-fuel-racism
- -

[DeSmogBlog opinion]
*Environmental Racism is at the Heart of Europe’s Continued Coal Use*
A new book highlights the impact European coal imports are having on 
communities based near mines around the world. It’s time for an end to 
all coal use, not just in electricity generation, argues Anne Harris.
OPINION
Environmental Racism is at the Heart of Europe’s Continued Coal Use
By Anne Harrison  - Apr 14, 2021

The overlap between racial inequalities and environmental issues is all 
too often ignored. A recent government report may claim that “we no 
longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against 
ethnic minorities”, but many UK companies still turn a profit by relying 
on abusive activities overseas.

Environmental racism is widespread, deadly and entirely avoidable, 
affecting the lives of millions of people around the world through the 
development of destructive projects concentrated around 
already-marginalised communities.

A recently published book by Still Burning, a network campaigning 
against coal imports to Europe and neocolonialism, explores the links 
between our addiction to coal and the deteriorating ecological and 
social conditions of communities living near mines supplying European 
power stations and steelworks.

Still Burning: Coal, Colonialism & Resistance details how governments 
and citizens are increasingly unwilling to tolerate coal mining’s 
extensive damage to human health and ecosystems within Europe’s borders. 
Yet at the same time, we refuse to fully consign these practices to the 
history books, instead forcing harmful industrial practices onto poorer 
countries, while Europe continues to enjoy use of the products. This 
enables us to avoid fundamentally changing our lifestyles and shift to a 
truly sustainable economy.

Forty-one percent of coal imported by Europe in 2017 came from Russia, 
and its impacts on nearby communities are brutal. As the Soviet Union 
was forming, Moscow extended its control eastwards with the building of 
forced labour camps, since referred to as “gulags”. These provided the 
workforce needed to log the “taiga” forests and mine coal from the 
central Siberian region now known as the Kuzbass, the main Russian coal 
mining region currently supplying overseas markets.

But it’s also home to the Shor and Teleut indigenous minorities, as the 
book highlights. One Shor woman, Valentina Bekrinova, describes the 
situation in her village, where dust blowing in from the nearby mines 
and waste heaps “coats everything” and explosions are “so loud they 
shake the whole house.”

She tells of how the coal mines’ encroachment into Shor ancestral land 
put an end to their low-impact existence. “This is the first year that 
there are no berries on the fruit bushes,” she says. “The soil quality 
is now really bad, with all of the coal dust… I used to collect plants 
from the forest but the coal mines are making the plants of the forest 
unhealthy… We Shor people respected nature, we took what it could 
provide and protected it. There is no respect any more, everything is 
destroyed.”

In coal-producing regions around the globe, local people often don’t 
even benefit from using the resources themselves. In Colombia, many 
communities have unreliable access to electricity, including those close 
to the mines. All the coal mined there is loaded onto super-sized ships, 
much of which is brought to Europe.

Coal is the greatest historical cause of climate change, and yet it is 
being extracted from water-starved regions where conditions are 
worsening as the climate changes. Owned by a trio of European-based 
multinationals, Cerrejón coal mine in La Guajira, in northern Colombia, 
squanders 17 million litres of water every day. Residents living nearby 
survive on less than a litre of drinking water a day.

Between 2008 and 2016, around 4,700 indigenous Wayuú children died due 
to a lack of food and water. The coal companies have diverted a stream, 
the Arroyo Bruno, which affected the water for 30 Wayuú communities and 
a total of 200,000 people in the region. These communities are fighting 
for the stream to be reinstated.

“To divert the river would kill it. It would be like taking a child’s 
mother away. It would be like taking our blood. How will we live?” asks 
Leonardo Sierra, representative of the Rocio community at Arroyo Bruno, 
in Still Burning.

In the absence of support, Covid-19 has worsened the already unbearable 
situation in some places with restrictions on movement preventing people 
from earning a living and feeding their families.

Narlis Guzmán Angulo, an indigenous human rights activist from the 
Sierra Cesar region of Colombia, fighting for her ancestral land against 
a coal mine owned by US company Drummond, describes how community 
resilience has been undermined: “In La Sierra we have always been able 
to feed ourselves with our agriculture, but that is over. Opencast coal 
mining ruined everything.”

The UK has agreed a coal phase-out for the last three coal power 
stations. Yet we are still implicated in many of these practices. The 
phase-out does not apply to coal mining nor coal use in steel-making or 
industry, and it doesn’t stop British companies’ activities in coal abroad.

Still Burning illustrates the urgent need for coal mines to close 
globally, in order to protect those affected by both the mining itself 
and climate change. Opening more mines in Europe to fuel ceaseless coal 
use is not the answer either, as this still contributes to a climate 
crisis that disproportionately affects communities of colour. We also 
urgently need to remove coal from steel-making as part of decarbonising 
the sector.

Science and technology will certainly be part of the solution, but it 
must be embedded in a radically different economic and political system 
that allows us to use technology without wrecking the environment and 
continuing the exploitation and inequality in our society. Technology 
alone does not address the racist violence inherent in state systems or 
the inequalities that are integral to capitalism.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/04/14/comment-environmental-racism-is-at-the-heart-of-europes-continued-coal-use/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 15, 1988 *

April 15, 1988: In a speech at St. John's University in New York, 
Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore states (specifically in 
reference to the threat of nuclear weapons, though the statement 
certainly applies to *another* worldwide threat): "I believe that it is 
possible that future generations will look back on this election year of 
1988 and wonder with amazement how we could have let these problems go 
unattended for so long."
(22:50--23:01)
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/GoreCampa


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