[✔️] April 25, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 25, 2021*/

[Climate Champion from YouTube Kids]
*Arlington Community Electricity by Hardy school green team*
Mar 30, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Jg5tb8L-c



[A nod and opinion on the disinformation war]
*It's Time to Kill Earth Day*
Andrew Couts
4-22-21
Hooray, it’s Earth Day! That one day of the year when we can all come 
together and celebrate treating our planet with respect. From 
first-graders to Jeff Bezos, everyone loves a good, ol’ fashion Earth 
Day. So, I regret to inform you that we must kill Earth Day and replace 
it with something more urgent.

The first Earth Day in 1970 was a radical idea, and it had radical 
results. Spearheaded as a national “teach-in” day by Sen. Gaylord 
Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat and famous conservationist, Earth Day grew 
out of the civil rights movement. A burgeoning but localized 
environmental movement inspired by author Rachel Carlson’s best-selling 
1962 book, Silent Spring, which detailed the devastating environmental 
effects of the chemical DDT, fed into the push as well. The devastating 
1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and the 
Cuyahoga River literally catching on fire the same year added increased 
pressure to address the deluge of pollution.

For the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, a reported 20 million 
Americans marched on behalf of their planet, solidifying environmental 
issues as a major concern for Americans. What followed was a spate of 
governmental action that is unthinkable today: The passage of the Clean 
Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Environmental 
Protection Agency, which President Richard Nixon signed into existence 
in December 1970. Today, Earth Day is celebrated in nearly every country.

Earth Day is, in short, largely responsible for the world’s 
environmental awakening and the regulations to rein in pollution that 
arose in the decades after that first iteration. The ripple effects of 
Earth Day and the ideas it instilled and inspired are so widespread and 
profound that they are virtually impossible to adequately summarize. (I 
highly recommend listening to this episode of NPR’s Thoughline to better 
understand Earth Day’s impact.)

Yet today, Earth Day has lost its radical identity right at the moment 
when that type of energy is essential to our continued existence on this 
planet. It has, instead, become a “celebration”—a Good Day for Brands™ 
to greenwash their environmental impacts by announcing pledges, 
environmental-themed musicals, deals, and this year, inexplicably, NFTs. 
As climate reporter Emily Atkin wrote in her Heated newsletter, all of 
these PR pitches are “hot, useless garbage” that have made Earth Day 
“hell on Earth” for environmental journalists.

Earth Day’s PR-friendly image is not a coincidence. The name “Earth Day” 
itself is the invention of renowned ad man Julian Koenig, who 
volunteered to help Sen. Nelson and Earth Day co-founder Denis Hayes 
with their cause. (Fun fact: Julian Koenig is the father of Sarah 
Koenig, creator of Serial.) And its widespread and enduring appeal is 
arguably thanks to how palatable it was to mainstream—read: white, 
suburban—America.

But the increasingly overt brand-friendliness of Earth Day is not merely 
an annoyance for cranky journalists. It poses a huge risk to the planet 
and people by lulling us into a false sense of things being marginally 
better. Big Oil’s main front group has spent the day tweeting about its 
supposed green bonafides. But the greenest bonafide would be it not 
existing. It would be Coke paying up for the plastic pollution it 
creates. It would be acknowledging the undue burden of pollution in 
communities of color, a legacy that continues since the first Earth Day.

Wilbur Thomas, a Black scientist, said in a speech on Earth Day 1970, 
“The nitty gritty issues relevant to Blacks is simply the fact that a 
disproportionate number of Blacks are exposed to more environmental 
health hazards than non-Blacks in addition to the regular burden.”

While the impacts of Earth Day are indisputable, so too is the deficient 
action we’ve taken in the decades since its inception. Humanity’s 
inaction over the past 51 years since Earth Day began has led to a 
global plastics crisis, the destruction of 97% of Earth’s ecosystems, 
melting glaciers, rising seas, water shortages, increases in extreme 
weather, and a carbon saturation in the atmosphere of 420 parts per 
million—up from 315 ppm when measurements began in the 1950s. Carbon 
dioxide levels in the atmosphere haven’t been this high for 3 million years.

In other words, while Earth Day ignited our collective consciousness 
around environmental issues and has, either directly or indirectly, led 
to unfathomable progress, it still wasn’t enough to combat the 
capitalistic forces that have led us to the yawning chasm stretching out 
before us today. And we still have yet to achieve true environmental 
justice that centers Black and brown communities living in the shadow of 
smokestacks and freeways. There’s movement to right those wrongs, yes. 
The youth climate movement and some traditional environmental 
organizations are finally opening the tent to communities of color. But 
we need the tent to grow even further and for radical ideas to be closer 
to the center.

At its inception, Earth Day was a revolutionary idea that marked a 
turning point for politics, policy, and the planet. But the celebratory, 
brand-friendly version of Earth Day we have today is detrimental to the 
very cause for which it ostensibly exists.

Earth Day must die because its existence allows for the illusion of 
action amid a fog of feel-good celebration, as if the climate is not 
currently on a collision course with catastrophe. Yes, Earth Day 
provides a handy anniversary for politicians to take real climate 
action, but the day itself has become scenery rather than the engine for 
change that we desperately need.

We need a new Earth Day with as much potency as the first Earth Day if 
we are to address the challenges that lay before us. We need a new idea 
to blast apart the partisan divides and monied forces that have wrecked 
the climate for power and profit. We need a newfound spark that, like 
the first Earth Day, further marries the movement for racial equality 
with a revolution in clean energies. And we need leaders who can help us 
ensure that this crucial moment of hope does not evaporate into a vapor 
of eternal failure.
Andrew Couts  Deputy Editor, Gizmodo
https://earther.gizmodo.com/its-time-to-kill-earth-day-1846739135



[planning ahead]
*Here’s How NYC Transit System Is Prepping For Sea Level Rise—And Why It 
May Not Be Enough*
BY NATHAN KENSINGER
APRIL 22, 2021

New York City is surrounded by water, with over 130 neighborhoods 
situated along 520 miles of coastline. Its populace of 8.3 million 
residents—the largest metro area in the United States—relies heavily on 
its vast transportation system. And as sea levels continue to rise, the 
future of both the city and its transportation network are in jeopardy.

Coney Island is an ideal place to view this present-day peril. Start on 
a dead-end stretch of Shore Parkway. The road here floods with even a 
light rain, covering the broken concrete in thick mud. On one side of 
the street is Coney Island Creek, where Hurricane Sandy’s surge pushed 
ashore and inundated this Brooklyn neighborhood in 2012.

Coney Island Yard Complex, one of the largest rapid transit train yards 
in the world, sits on the other side. This 74-acre facility was flooded 
with 27 million gallons of seawater during the hurricane, leaving the 
train yard crippled.

“Coinciding with the high tide, the storm washed in water and debris 
which quickly inundated the tracks, switches, motors and signal 
equipment. In Sandy's wake, the yard more closely resembled a lake than 
a storage area for subway trains,” New York’s Metropolitan 
Transportation Authority (MTA) wrote in a 2013 synopsis. “The storm left 
the track-switching operation at the world's largest rapid transit 
maintenance and storage facility unable to be controlled remotely.”

Since 2018, the MTA has been working on a project to protect the Coney 
Island Yard from future storms and sea level rise. The authority built 
21,000 feet of new drainage, nine flood gates, two pumping stations and 
a 4,280-foot-long bridge above the yard, elevating third-rail power 
lines and communications cables out of the flood zone. They are also 
erecting a 12,000-foot-long floodwall around the perimeter of the yard.

This enormous flood barrier is not yet finished, but several pieces can 
be seen along the muddy edge of Shore Parkway. It is a brutal, 
utilitarian piece of work, made of metal sheets driven 30 feet 
underground that then stretch 8 to 14 feet toward the sky. The wall 
currently ends at a porous metal fence lined with burst sandbags, 
providing a stark reminder of what previously protected the yard.

Similar rebuilding and mitigation efforts are taking place around the 
city. When Hurricane Sandy overwhelmed New York City, it damaged almost 
every part of the transit system. Boats were pushed onto train tracks, 
tunnels and subway stations flooded, and bus depots and train yards were 
filled with corrosive saltwater. During the storm, some of the MTA’s 
flood barriers were little more than plywood and piles of sandbags.

Once complete, these upgrades are intended to protect the yard and the 
five boroughs from future cyclones and torrential downpours—calamities 
whose rains, surges, and winds are being boosted by the climate crisis. 
For those who have assessed the threat of sea level rise in New York 
City, even this may not be enough.

One Enormous Challenge, Many Little Fixes
After Superstorm Sandy, the MTA committed $7.7 billion toward rebuilding 
and making its system more resilient. It also created a Climate 
Adaptation Task Force to evaluate the threats facing the transportation 
system and recommend solutions. One of its first tasks was to determine 
what level of flooding to actually plan for.

“For the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), climate change is 
not only an urgent reality, it is a reality to which all six MTA 
agencies are already devoting extensive financial, planning, and 
engineering resources,” the task force wrote in its 2017 report. “There 
is no responsible alternative,”

Four of the MTA’s six branches adopted different Design Flood 
Elevations, but the water rise they anticipate is sobering.

MTA Bridges and Tunnels, which operates seven bridges and two tunnels in 
New York City, is preparing for a 500-year storm akin to Hurricane 
Harvey. The Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad systems 
manage 1,381 miles of tracks and 247 train stations. They are preparing 
for flooding four feet above FEMA’s Advisory Base Flood Elevations 
(ABFE). And New York City Transit, the regulators of all subways and 
buses, is designing for three feet above a Category 2 hurricane.

“The challenges that come from climate change are much greater today 
than they were when many of the MTA’s features were designed and 
created,” Projjal Dutta, the task force chair and the MTA’s Director of 
Sustainability Initiatives, told Gothamist/WNYC in a recent interview. 
The task force is currently tracking a dozen projects. “Our 
interventions are rarely of a grand scale. They are not storm surge 
barriers. But, they are small, they are numerous.”

The finished projects include waterproofing Staten Island’s St. George 
Terminal with a new drainage system, floodwalls, and water-resistant 
plastic track ties. The authority built a seawall along the Harlem River 
at the 207th Street Yard and installed thousands of smaller barriers 
across Manhattan, including flood doors and flex barriers at subway 
entrances.

“A lot of the flooding happened through these very small things that you 
would not think of as grand at all. But when there is 10 or 11 feet of 
standing water above these openings, that can amount to a lot,” said 
Dutta. “In Lower Manhattan alone, there are approximately 500 of them, 
from manhole covers to where the grates equalize the air pressure.”

Mission accomplished...for now
In March, the MTA marked a major milestone in its rebuilding efforts, 
completing repairs and upgrades on the last of its 11 tunnels that Sandy 
damaged. Inside the Rutgers Tube, where the F line travels underneath 
the East River, they replaced 4,635 feet of subway track, repaired 250 
feet of tunnel wall and installed hundreds of thousands of feet of 
signal and communications cables.

“We are nearing the completion of all the Sandy-related resilience 
work,” Janno Lieber, the President of MTA Construction & Development, 
recently told Gothamist/WNYC. “This is huge stuff. I mean the whole 
system, we needed to move the controls out of the flood zone. We’ve 
needed to harden a ton of infrastructure to keep water out. We’ve needed 
to increase pumping capacity in 11 tunnels that were deluged.”

Ultimately, the MTA’s investment will only protect the transit system 
for a limited period of time. In its March 2019 report, the New York 
City Panel on Climate Change projected that the city is facing between 
1.25 and 9.5 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. This will 
permanently flood some neighborhoods, augmenting tidal flooding and 
storm surges along the way. According to one of the report’s authors, a 
large-scale managed retreat from the waterfront seems inevitable.

“It will be a city at higher elevations,” said Dr. Klaus Jacob, a 
geophysicist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who served on the 
city’s climate panel from 2008 to 2019. He anticipates that residents in 
dozens of coastal neighborhoods will need to relocate to higher ground 
as sea levels rise.

“This will cost at least in the hundreds of billions as a project 
because it’s not just the housing,” Jacob added. “If you move around 
hundreds of thousands of people, it will [mean] changes for school 
capacity, for medical facilities, parks, libraries, you name it. The 
whole infrastructure of the city will have to adapt to this migration.”

A managed retreat of this scale would influence the MTA’s 
infrastructure, especially its coastal train routes, which would have to 
be moved inland, according to Jacob. This would be extremely difficult, 
given the density of the region’s buildings and other infrastructure.

“Many of them are at such low lying places,” said Jacob. “The only 
opportunity I see, if we want to modernize and stabilize our train 
connections in the Atlantic coastal areas, is to go to elevated tracks.”

Jacob has worked on several assessments of how sea level rise will 
impact the MTA, including a pre-Sandy evaluation that predicted some of 
the storm damage. In a more recent analysis, he and a team of Columbia 
engineering graduate students evaluated how the MTA’s new network of 
approximately 4,000 flood measures in Manhattan would fare during 
another Sandy.

“It was amazing how much the leakage rate or the flooding of the subway 
had gone down. It was essentially eliminated,” said Jacob. “That would 
get you way beyond the year 2050 and maybe even later, depending on the 
rate of sea level rise.”

But that is if the system performs precisely as designed. The team 
tested what would happen if certain singular failures occur. They found 
that if just one barrier at a subway entrance were to fail, it would be 
almost like the other 3,999 odd barriers weren’t there.

“There’s no redundancy in the system,” said Jacob, who recommended that 
the MTA create an entirely new set of backups for its Manhattan flood 
protection. “It’s the famous weakest link in the chain.”

With many pieces of its infrastructure at or below sea level, the MTA is 
painfully aware of the threats posed by the climate crisis. The 
Metro-North’s Hudson line is located at the edge of the Hudson River. 
The A train barely skims above Jamaica Bay. Elevating or relocating 
train lines and moving facilities to higher ground may eventually become 
necessary, but the MTA is saving those decisions for a later date.

“Right now, we are not retreating, we are battening down the hatches and 
making sure that all of our systems can manage the risk that has been 
created by climate change,” said Lieber from MTA Construction & 
Development. “We learned a lot from the Sandy experience. No part of the 
city was hit harder than the MTA, so we are trying to put all those 
lessons into effect. So, I am going to leave [it] to wiser heads, the 
question of retreat.”

Columbia University’s Earth Institute will convene a conference this 
June to investigate the question At What Point Managed Retreat? It is a 
conundrum facing cities around the world. For Jacob, the answer is clear.

“Why don’t we start to plan for that now. That means our land use and 
zoning will have to be updated now,” said Jacob. “New York City better 
adapt. Because if it’s not adapting, it’s doomed.”

Full disclosure: Nathan Kensinger will be an unpaid panelist at the 
Columbia University academic conference on managed retreat mentioned in 
this article.
https://gothamist.com/news/heres-how-nyc-transit-system-is-prepping-for-sea-level-riseand-why-it-may-not-be-enough



[Legacy of Kivalina v Exxon]
*The Life and Death of a Pioneering Environmental Justice Lawyer*
How Luke Cole and an Alaskan community spearheaded a landmark climate 
lawsuit against fossil fuel giants — and helped empower other 
marginalized communities to stand up for themselves.
Headshot of author Rico Moore
By Rico Mooreon Apr 7, 2021
-  -
Following Cole’s death, most people believed it was a tragic accident, 
but some speculated it may have been intentional. However, Caroline 
Farrell, Cole’s colleague, doubts this is the case, saying that such a 
monumental loss may have led some to believe there was a monumental 
reason for it. She believes Cole’s death might have been the result of a 
very bad set of circumstances. This conclusion is the consensus of those 
closest to him.

Harris, the founding board chair of Cole’s legal nonprofit, says that 
although the movement lost a powerful figure when Cole died, the vision 
he was working for — “of empowerment for the poor and communities of 
color, and his desire to stop this system of extraction and 
accumulation” — is in some ways more powerful than before. “I feel the 
loss personally for this person that I cared about,” she said. “But I 
think the work really continues, and that he is present in the work.”

Cole’s bold and innovative work with the people of Kivalina lives on as 
the community today pursues climate justice through the United Nations.

“Whatever he did was designed to empower us, to give us a voice.”

Collen Swan, Kivalina citizen
In January 2020, Kivalina and the Louisiana Tribes brought their joint 
complaint to the UN, alleging that the U.S. government has failed to 
protect them from the impacts of climate change, and have thus violated 
a number of their human rights: to self-determination, cultural 
heritage, subsistence and food security, individual and collective 
rights to safe drinking water, physical and mental health, and an 
adequate standard of living.

The UN responded to the complaint on September 15, 2020, and will soon 
be conducting a site visit to investigate the claims.

“The tribe feels that the government failed them in the efforts of 
relocating the village,” Kivalina tribal administrator Millie Hawley 
said, “and they’re looking for funding to relocate the village — that 
risk of losing their lives now — it used to be just losing 
infrastructure — but now it’s losing lives actually in the event of an 
ocean storm surge.”

“Once you’ve made the connections between environmental harm and human 
rights, then climate change as this massive global environmental harm 
would adversely affect human rights in all kinds of ways,” said John 
Knox, Wake Forest University law professor and former UN Special 
Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment. He said Cole’s efforts 
with Kivalina can be thought of as part of a larger movement to take a 
rights-based approach to environmental issues, and climate change is 
primary among them.

Knox says some of the most successful climate lawsuits globally are 
grounded in human rights arguments. And according to Knox, the UN Human 
Rights Council is currently considering whether or not to appoint a 
Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change.

The U.S. Ambassador to the UN didn’t respond to requests for comment 
regarding the complaint.

Today, Kivalina’s immediate prospects for relocating are dim, but the 
community continues to fight for the resources to adapt to the changing 
climate. Between 2009 and 2010, the community began construction of a 
rock revetment — essentially a sea wall — but funding ran out before it 
could be finished. Although it has served to protect Kivalina’s people 
to some degree from storm surges and flooding, this rocky barrier will 
only last 10 to 15 years, and according to Hawley, the revetment is 
already sinking into the ocean — by eight feet according to her 
estimate. In 2019, the Alaska Department of Transportation started 
building an evacuation bridge and road connecting the beleaguered Arctic 
island to the mainland. But seven miles inland, at the new road’s end, 
the village’s new school has only just begun construction, with 
completion scheduled for August 2022. A large bus barn is scheduled for 
completion by this fall, which can serve as shelter if the school isn’t 
complete, according to the school district.

But the disappearance of protective sea ice has hit home for the tribe 
in other major ways too, according to Hawley. “It’s even hard to talk 
about because it’s a dying culture,” Hawley said. “We used to harvest 
our bearded seal and live on our seal oil and meat throughout the winter 
every year, and we never worried about food, but after two or three 
years without the barrier, due to lack of ice … it really affected us in 
that way,” she said.

Meanwhile, the planet continues to warm rapidly and Kivalina is still 
very much under existential threat — more so with each degree of warming 
and each passing storm season. Some reports suggest Kivalina may be 
uninhabitable as early as 2025. Nevertheless, its citizens are still 
fighting for their future as a sovereign tribal nation, trying to 
survive climate change with their culture intact by relocating off the 
island.

Like the people of Kivalina with whom he worked, Cole never gave up. He 
only did so because he died. Those who knew him well say he was only 
getting started. His task? Infusing climate change mobilization with the 
tools of environmental justice law he’d worked so hard to develop. His 
goal? No less than changing an oppressive system that is destroying the 
planet. And although his work as an environmental justice lawyer is 
over, it continues on in those he influenced, knew, worked with, and loved.

“The voice that he gave me will never be silenced because of what he did 
for us,” Swan said. “I’m not the only one either.”

“Whatever he did was designed to empower us,” Swan said, “to give us a 
voice. It didn’t stop with a judge’s decision or a government decision. 
It didn’t end when we didn’t get what we wanted — no matter what it is — 
no matter what avenue we took. It didn’t stop.”
https://www.desmog.com/2021/04/07/luke-cole-environmental-justice-law-kivalina/
- -
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6656724/Louisiana-Tribes-Complaint-to-UN.pdf
- -
[Understanding the importance of a dismissed suit]
*Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp*., No. 4:08-cv-01138 (N.D. Cal.), is a 
lawsuit filed on February 26, 2008, in a United States district court. 
The suit, based on the common law theory of nuisance, claims monetary 
damages from the energy industry for the destruction of Kivalina, Alaska 
by flooding caused by climate change. The damage estimates made by the 
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Government Accountability Office 
are placed between $95 million and $400 million. This lawsuit is an 
example of greenhouse gas emission liability.[1]

The suit was dismissed by the United States district court on September 
30, 2009, on the grounds that regulating greenhouse emissions was a 
political rather than a legal issue and one that needed to be resolved 
by Congress and the Administration rather than by courts.[2] An appeal 
was filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in November 2009.[3] 
In September 2012, the panel of appeals judges decided not to reinstate 
the case.[4] The city appealed the court of appeals decision to the U.S. 
Supreme Court and on May 20, 2013 the Supreme Court justices decided not 
hear the case, effectively ending the city's legal claim.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivalina_v._ExxonMobil_Corp.



[A class case for 10°C above]
MAY 22, 2020
*10C Above Baseline*
BY ROBERT HUNZIKER
evertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned 
by John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the 
European Commission in Brussels.
***
Doyle’s thesis of a 10C world, within current lifetimes, is based upon 
sober-minded analysis. Of course, it envisions a planet of few or maybe 
no humans. Granted, it is hard to believe, very hard to accept.

Whereas, the Paris Agreement of 2015 officially set goals amongst the 
nations of the world to employ mitigation measures to hold global 
temperatures to 2C but preferably 1.5C above pre-industrial, which is 
mid 18th century (1750s), except for IPCC measurement purposes, which 
are markedly different from the 18th century pre-industrial baseline, to 
wit: ”The baseline period from which climate change is expressed has 
also moved on (a common baseline period of 1986–2005 is used throughout, 
consistent with the 2006 start-point for the RCP scenario).” (Source: 
AR5 Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Hmm!

Meanwhile, 1.5C has become a cause célèbre among climate activists. But, 
there’s a rub: In order to stay below 1.5C, greenhouse gas emissions, 
like CO2, need to fall off a cliff, decreasing by 15% per year, starting 
in year 2020. (Doyle)

Categorically, that’s impossible to achieve for a host of reasons.

Not so long ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 
released a special report about 2C versus 1.5C. Its findings were grim, 
namely: At 2˚C (3.6˚F) rather than at 1.5˚C (2.7˚F) the danger to 
ecosystems increases several fold.

As things stand, the world has a comfort zone of 1.5C to 2.0C with 1.5C 
the clear preference. But still, at 2.0C all kinds of bells and whistles 
go off, e.g., (1) severe heat events increase by 2.6xs (2) the Wet Bulb 
Temperature WBT-impact (3) 2xs vertebrate species loss and (4) 90% of 
coral reefs gone for good, etc., etc., etc. as key ecosystems that 
support and originate life suffer.

Keeping in mind (lest you forget) there is no Planet B.

So then, what of 10C?

John Doyle, a climate resilience analyst, has studied the climate system 
and discussed findings at a UN Aid Agencies meeting, John Doyle, 
Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission, 
Information Society and Media Directorate-General.

Doyle is working on mainstreaming Sustainable Development in the 
Information Society Directorate General with special emphasis on 
business partnerships to address energy and climate security.

A synopsis of Doyle’s disturbing analysis and speech follows herein:

One of the video power-point headlines boldly proclaims: “Science… We’re 
heading fast for 10C degrees, 4C is extinction.”

Doyle: “Roughly speaking, you’ve been told that we may be heading for 
1.5c or 2c degrees above pre-industrial temperature. That’s not true. 
That’s basically very old science, and it’s essentially inaccurate. 
There isn’t a single independent scientist of the world that would 
support that position now. We’re actually heading for 10 degrees warming 
that could happen within 20 to 30 years. And, on the way to 10 degrees, 
we pass 4 degrees. Now, four degrees is interesting because that’s 
extinction for our species. So keep that one in mind. I’m not just 
making this up.”

All of which prompts a question: Along the way to 10C, when does 4C 
happen? If 10C is on the docket within 20-30 years, as explained by 
Doyle, then it’s probably safe to assume 4C within 8-15 years. 
Regrettably, that’s within the lifetimes of pretty much the entire world 
population now approaching 8B. Talk about impact!

Predicting a 10C uplift in global temperatures beyond pre-industrial is 
a stunning proposition, absolutely stunning! Indeed, his speech is a 
death-defying prognostication, but truth be told, nobody will believe it!

A review of literature of other climate scientists adds some dimension 
to Doyle’s work, to wit: In December 2019, the Potsdam Institute For 
Climate Research, one of the world’s premier climate research orgs, 
caused an international stir with a paper published in Nature: “Climate 
Tipping Points – Too Risky To Bet Against.”

A very interesting statement is found within the Potsdam paper, as 
follows: “The Earth system has been unstable across multiple timescales 
before, under relatively weak forcing caused by changes in Earth’s 
orbit. Now we are strongly forcing the system, with atmospheric CO2 
concentration and global temperature increasing at rates that are an 
order of magnitude higher than those during the most recent 
de-glaciation… Atmospheric CO2 is already at levels last seen around 
four million years ago, in the Pliocene epoch. It is rapidly heading 
towards levels last seen some 50 million years ago — in the Eocene — 
when temperatures were up to 14 °C higher than they were in 
pre-industrial times.”

Here’s more Doyle: “Since the last International Panel on Climate Change 
Assessment Report AR5 was published… All of this has come to light since 
then. We’ve realized that we have been living in a fool’s paradise, 
thinking that nice gentle reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and 
maybe changing to electric cars should see us over the bump. This is 
simply not the case.”

Doyle’s outlook darkens, as he declares the geo-engineering concept of 
sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere nowhere near ready for deployment and 
likely not possible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which 
essentially says: “You cannot build a machine to clean up the mess you 
made making the machine.”

Heaven forbid! People are depending upon geo-engineering to bail us out. 
What if it doesn’t?

Here’s more Doyle: “In the last 30 years we’ve been able to measure that 
the total amount of vertebrate life on this planet has collapsed by 99%. 
And, what’s left, at least from the tiny human being up to the big 
elephant are found loads of cows, loads of humans, and virtually no wild 
animals. It’s way worse than that. There are no wild animals. There are 
no fish. There are no insects. Your microbiome inside your own body is 
collapsing, at least 20% to 30% down over the last 20 to 30 years… We 
are not on the verge of the sixth mass extinction; we’re in the middle 
of it. And very likely to be part of it.”

Additionally, the Wet Bulb Temperature effect received mention: “This 
gives you the temperatures that living creatures can survive… on the 
left hand side you can see 42C (107.6F) degrees. Human beings can easily 
survive well over that. But there’s a catch… The fittest human being on 
the planet, if he is in a temperature of 36C degrees (96.8F) where 
there’s 100% relative humidity, he dies in six hours.”

“I (Doyle) was in a city (Brussels) in Europe in August. The temperature 
was 36C degrees and the relative humidity was 40. It only needed to be 
one and a half degrees higher and about 20% extra humidity for tens of 
thousands of people to be dying in the streets.”

Doyle provided additional evidence of the ongoing extinction event. 
Flying insect populations have crashed by 80% in Europe over the past 40 
years. We don’t survive without insects… no questions asked!

But, there is one question: What causes 80% of flying insects to drop 
dead within a half-lifespan of an average human? Something is horribly 
wrong!

Solutions? Eliminating fossil fuels in enough time to stem excessive 
warming will not work for numerous reasons. Not only that, fossil fuels 
account for approximately 80% of all energy production, and there’s no 
way that’ll change soon enough to help within the next 10 years.

As an aside to Doyle’s terrifying speech, according to the IEA 
(International Energy Agency) fossil fuel producers, like the U.S., 
Russia, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, plan on increasing oil and gas production 
by 120% by 2030, continuing to emit CO2 of ever-higher levels, bringing 
on more blanketed heat. China is embarking on mega-mega construction of 
new coal-burning power plants, and so is India, and Japan recently 
announced its intention to build 22 new coal-burning plants over the 
next 5 years, continuing to emit CO2 in ever-larger numbers, bringing on 
more blanketed heat. All of that in the face of irrefutable evidence of 
acceleration of climate change well beyond the influence of natural 
events. Maybe the world really is crazy after all.

According to Doyle: “The only option for “getting out of this mess is to 
stop pretending that we are going green.” To survive as a species, we 
must switch to local production and forget globalized growth. It’s over. 
The economic growth paradigm of neoliberal capitalism is incompatible 
with human survival, especially for life-supporting ecosystems.

It is worth noting that two respected French climate research 
organizations reached conclusions somewhat similar to Doyle’s but with 
much less gusto in their numbers. National Centre for Meteorological 
Research (CNRM) and Institute Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modelling 
Centre in Paris contend, if CO2 emissions continue “business as usual,” 
then temperatures could increase by 7°C by 2100.

Still, it is incomprehensible, not impossible, that temperatures 
skyrocket 10C over the next 20-30 years. Is Doyle’s assessment 
realistic? What if it is?

Yet, Doyle’s thesis need not be 100% correct to disrupt and destroy 
ecosystems and cause panic amongst humankind. If he is 50% correct, 
large portions of the planet become uninhabitable. That’s just for starters.

And, if Doyle’s daunting analysis is only 25% correct, hard-charging 
2C-plus circumstances will change life forever, less agricultural land, 
higher tidal flooding, and eco migrants by the hundreds of millions 
roaming countryside in massive waves of human flesh, searching for 
anything edible.

Indeed, it’s always instructive to look at other viewpoints, for 
example, the prestigious Met Office Hadley Centre/UK, assuming “business 
as usual” expects 4C by 2055. That’s more than enough to do the dirty work.

An International Panel on Climate Conference at Oxford University 
conducted a program entitled “4 Degrees and Beyond” that examined the 
likelihood of 4C, if “business as usual.” Their conclusion: Half of the 
planet turns uninhabitable.

All of which highlights a problem. “Business as usual” is thriving!

(… already looking past the speed bump COVID19)

According to Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, CO2 emissions for the month 
of April 2020 were 416.18 ppm versus 413.52 ppm for the month of April 
2019. And, for added context, readings of 371.66 ppm were recorded for 
the month of April 2000.

“Business as usual” has not slowed down one iota in 62 years ever since 
Mauna Loa Observatory started collecting CO2 data in 1958. Noticeably, 
it has already accelerated+60% this century.

Maybe Doyle is onto something!
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at 
rlhunziker at gmail.com.

- -
[interactive graphics by YoursTruly - because scientists were shy about 
connecting to scenarios]
*How bad can it be? ...and when?*
The chart below has linked hotspots. In the lower right corner of the 
chart notice the temperature line for the current year. There are seven 
future projections plotted.

The graphic IPCC Chart uses data from special report emissions scenario 
for the IPCC.   Links below in blue are summarized projections for each 
degree change taken from the book "Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter 
Planet" - Mark Lynas and videos segments from National Geographics.
For an excellent video introduction to the global warming problem see 
the National Geographic video of Global Warming 101
Six degrees http://localsteps.org/6degreemap.html
Six Degrees [is 10.8°F see the video]
The apocalypse.
The end-Permian mass extinction of 251 million years ago was associated 
with six degrees of warming, and wiped out 90% of life on Earth.
Huge firestorms sweep the planet as methane hydrate fireballs ignite.
Seas turn anoxic and release poisonous hydrogen sulphide.
Humanity’s very survival as a species in question.
Notes from Mark Lynas author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Six Degrees video description from National Geographic
http://localsteps.org/howbad.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 25, 1999 *

April 25, 1999: Reviewing former ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick's 
book "Gore: A Political Life" (which was published by the right-wing 
outfit Regnery), the New York Times' Richard L. Berke notes that the 
book does a hatchet job on the Vice President's climate advocacy:

"For example, while some environmentalists describe Gore's book 'Earth 
in the Balance' as an impressive work that incorporates his knowledge of 
global warming and other issues, Zelnick dismisses it as 'pathetically 
one-dimensional in its view of Western civilization, shabby in its 
ignorance of economics, simplistic in its approach to problem solving.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/reviews/990425.25berket.html


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