[✔️] June 28, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*June 28, 2021*/

[brief video]
*'The worst is yet to come': Draft UN climate report warns of drastic 
changes over 30 years*
Jun 23, 2021
FRANCE 24 English
#Climatechange will fundamentally reshape life on #Earth in the coming 
decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming #greenhousegas 
emissions, according to a landmark draft report from the #UN's climate 
science advisors obtained by AFP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NML_76FcY7E

- -

[CBS calls it an Omega Block]
*Pacific Northwest bakes under once in a millennium heat dome*
The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, 
Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one 
measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event — which means 
that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you'd 
likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.

Portland, Oregon, has already broken its all-time record hottest 
temperature at 108 degrees on Saturday and the peak of the heat wave has 
not even been reached yet. Canada is expected to register the nation's 
all-time highest temperature before the event is done. These are 
extremely dangerous numbers, especially in a region not used to heat 
like this, where many people do not have air conditioning.

By Monday, some — if not all —  of the all-time record highs seen below 
are forecast to break, with many more cities not listed here expected to 
achieve the same feat.
The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant atmospheric 
blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate changed world where 
baseline temperatures are already a couple to a few degrees higher than 
nature intended...
- -
Turns out, the models were correct and we should expect extreme heat 
waves, even unprecedented ones like this to become more routine. "There 
is no context really, in the sense that there is no analog in our past 
for what we are likely to see this week," says Dr. Michael Mann, 
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State and author 
of the new book The New Climate War.

But calling it a new normal does not suffice says Mann, "Some people 
called this a 'new normal. But it is worse than that," explained Mann. 
"We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves, droughts, 
wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the planet through 
fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-dome-2021-seattle-portland-weather/
- -
https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1408602303876124672
https://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2021/06/27/c402e6a8-eb97-4a29-a4c4-0f353f7f88f0/65faaed647742ccd63dfb7835c2cd8f2/2017summerheatpreppackage-bellcurve-animated-en-title-sm.gif

- -

[The Guardian article 5 years ago ]
*Omega block is nature's secret weapon*
The mechanism that brought floods to the Ile de France and a prolonged 
heatwave to the American Midwest is still not fully understood
David Hambling -  16 Jun 2016 -
- -
This type of block can remain in place for weeks, preventing the normal 
eastward progression of weather systems. Last month’s blocking high 
fixed a low pressure area over western Europe. Bad weather persisted, 
and rather than producing passing showers, the clouds dropped all their 
rain in the same place. There was record rainfall in the Ile de France 
region around Paris.
The same phenomenon brings weeks of fine weather. A month before Europe 
suffered a deluge, the American Midwest enjoyed a prolonged spell of 
dry, sunny days from a more benign omega block. But the blocks can be 
bad news in the US too, amplifying severe storms and producing tornadoes 
even in areas that are normally free of them, as happened in 2014.

The mechanism of blocking is still not well understood. We do not know 
why some weather systems anchor themselves while others do not. So in a 
sense, the omega block, bringer of extreme weather, really is nature’s 
secret weapon.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/16/omega-block-natures-secret-weapon-weatherwatch



[XR Activism report from SkyNews]
*Climate change: Seven tonnes of horse manure dumped outside newspaper 
offices at Extinction Rebellion rally*
Campaigners say a small number of billionaires control most UK 
newspapers and are little more than establishment mouthpieces.
Sunday 27 June 2021
Hundreds of Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters have marched through 
London in a demonstration aimed at the British press.

The Metropolitan Police said 23 people were arrested during the rally, 
including a handful who were involved in seven tonnes of horse manure 
being dumped outside the Daily Mail offices in Kensington, central London...
- -
XR co-founder Dr Gail Bradbook told Sky News: "When the power of the 
press is held in the hands of too few, we don't have a functioning 
democracy.

"This is a serious problem. We are running out of time, and the press 
isn't holding the government to account."
https://news.sky.com/story/seven-tonnes-of-horse-manure-dumped-outside-newspaper-offices-at-extinction-rebellion-rally-12343413 




[Yes, the worst]
*Dire impact of climate change to hit sooner than anticipated: IPCC*
Jun 23, 2021
Arirang News
The devastating impact of climate change is on track to hit much sooner 
than previously anticipated.
This according to a UN report that says that human life will be reshaped 
in the next decades,...even with further a reduction of greenhouse gas 
emissions.
Choi Min-jung reports.

Pointing out the "worst is yet to come",… climate experts are warning 
that people should expect to witness the dire consequences of drastic 
climate change within 30 years.
This is according to a draft report from the United Nation's 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,… accessed exclusively by AFP.
The draft warns of the severe impacts climate change will have on the 
planet,... including weather, food production, and eco-systems.
The report also draws attention to the effect of global warming on 
humanity,… warning that "life on Earth can recover from a drastic 
climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new 
ecosystems",….  however humans cannot.

The draft reports went on to say that a rise in global temperatures by 
more than 1-point-5 degrees Celsius will bring irreversible consequences.
However, the earth's temperature has already risen by 1-point-1 degrees 
compared to pre-industrial levels,… and looking at the current trend, 
experts say it may even reach 3 degrees.
This is well above the goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims 
to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.
Even with 2-hundred nations abiding by the agreement, 14-percent of the 
global population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once in 5 
years.
The IPCC stresses that it is crucial for all levels of society,... from 
individuals, businesses, to governments,... to do their parts to avoid 
the worst-case scenario.
Choi Min-jung, Arirang News.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmG0pNO_N9U



[pay discrepancy]
*These are the hotshot firefighters leading attacks against California 
wildfires. And they're quitting*
(CNN)A swirling tornado of flames reaching 40,000 feet into the sky tore 
through a California city in 2018, leaving a veteran hotshot firefighter 
horrified.

The fire tornado, which obliterated entire neighborhoods in Redding, 
California, during the massive Carr Fire, still haunts former hotshot 
supervisor Aaron Humphrey. He says that terrifying moment forever 
changed his outlook.
"You are in a fog and expecting death or disaster around every corner 
... It collectively killed my hotshot spirit," Humphrey, 44, said of the 
fire tornado.
"Hump," as fellow firefighters and friends call him, supervised hotshot 
crews from the US Forest Service on blister-inducing hikes to dig out 
fire lines, hack down trees and set blazes to fight advancing flames. 
Hotshot crews of 20 to 22 people spearhead fire attacks, and it's not 
uncommon for them to hike 10 miles daily with fire gear packs that can 
weigh up to 45 pounds.
Hump rose up from a seasonal rookie firefighter to the prestigious 
position of supervisor of the Eldorado Hotshots. He called it the "best 
job in the world."
But he quit a year ago.
After 25 years, Hump says he became just the latest mentally fried, 
underpaid hotshot veteran to leave, at a time when California wildfires 
are at their worst...
- -
First-year federal hotshots make $13.50 an hour, according to David 
Alicea, vice president of the Forest Service Union in California...
- -
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/26/us/california-wildfires-hotshot-firefighter-shortage/index.html


[Anglo Americans have been doing this for centuries]*
**Dispossessed, Again: Climate Change Hits Native Americans Especially Hard*
Many Native people were forced into the most undesirable areas of 
America, first by white settlers, then by the government. Now, parts of 
that marginal land are becoming uninhabitable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/climate/climate-Native-Americans.html



[NYTimes ponders]
*What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?*
Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of 
politics in facing down the threat to the planet.

*Kim Stanley Robinson: *Well, we are stuck in an international system of 
nation-states, and we don’t have time to invent and institute any kind 
of alternative world governance, so we have to use what we’ve got. But 
we also have the Paris agreement, and climate equity was written into it 
so that developed rich nations were tasked with paying more and doing 
more and helping the historically disadvantaged and even colonized 
nations. Executing all that is, of course, a different story...
..It is a fragile system. It could become like the League of Nations. In 
the future, to the extent that there will be historians, they may look 
back and say it was a good idea that failed. People may look back to our 
time and say, Here was a crux, and then they blew it. This is the power 
of the basic science-fictional exercise of looking at our own time as if 
from the future, thus judging ourselves as actors in creating history. 
 From that imaginary perspective, it can sometimes become blazingly 
obvious what we should do now. Parochial concerns over quarterly returns 
or the selfish privileges of currently existing wealthy people fade to 
insignificance when you take the long view and see us teetering on the 
edge of causing a mass-extinction event that would hammer all future 
living creatures.
- -
*Saul Griffith:* It’s not even remotely close to sufficient. But 
something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came 
out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 
2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than 
John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we’ll go to the moon by the end 
of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon 
was. We don’t know all the answers of where we’re going.

Now you see, basically daily, the news stories of automobile companies 
bringing forward the date of the last time they’re going to produce the 
internal-combustion-engine car. It’s gone from 2050 for most companies 
last year to 2030, and some are talking 2025. We might just be at the 
very beginning of the reinforcing cycle of ambition begetting more 
commitment, which begets more ambition. We are absolutely not even 
remotely on track yet. But this, I think, is what it feels like as you 
start to ramp up...
- -
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/magazine/ezra-klein-climate-crisis.html




[Climate Fiction]
*Stories to save the world: the new wave of climate fiction*
Now more than ever, novelists are facing up to the unthinkable: the 
climate crisis. Claire Armitstead talks to Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh 
and more about the new cli-fi
Claire Armitstead - Sat 26 Jun 2021

In September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire, tweeted a 
photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon course 
as wildfires raged in the background. “In the pantheon of visual 
metaphors for America today, this is the money shot,” he wrote of the 
picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who spotted the 
photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane. Everything about 
this story – the image, the circumstances – seems stranger than fiction.

A year before Simon’s tweet, in a landmark polemic, The Great 
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Indian novelist Amitav 
Ghosh had questioned why so few writers – himself included – were 
tackling the world’s most pressing issue in their fiction. But now, as 
extreme weather swirls around the globe, melting glaciers, burning 
forests, flooding districts and annihilating species, the climate 
emergency has brought the unimaginable into our daily lives and 
literature. A survivor in Jessie Greengrass’s haunting new novel The 
High House sums it up: “The whole complicated system of modernity which 
had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling … and we were 
becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the 
weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow while we had all been busy, 
while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the 
future had slipped into the present.”...
- -
Greengrass is among a growing number of novelists who are confronting 
this unfolding catastrophe through the young genre of climate fiction – 
or “cli-fi”. Among the new arrivals are the Irish writer Niall Bourke, 
whose novel Line conjures the Boschian image of refugees queueing for 
generations in an arid land; and Bethany Clift, whose Last One at the 
Party is the diary of an unnamed thirtysomething who decides to revel 
her way to the end, as the sole survivor of a pandemic. In August, 
Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun will take us to a 
climate-ravaged near-future California. And in September, Anthony Doerr 
will follow his Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See with 
Cloud Cuckoo Land, set between 15th-century Constantinople, Idaho in 
2020 and space some time in the future. Doerr has said of the book: “The 
world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, 
pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to reflect those 
anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope.”

So what has changed since Ghosh published The Great Derangement? “I 
think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018,” 
he says now. “It was partly because there were so many extreme climate 
events that year – the California wildfires, flooding in India, a 
succession of brutal hurricanes – but partly also because of the 
publication of Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”

This is a big claim to make for a novel. His point, says Ghosh, is not 
just about the book itself, but the welcome it received (including being 
shortlisted for the Booker prize). “It wasn’t hived off into the usual 
silos of climate change or speculative fiction, but was treated as a 
mainstream novel. I do think that was a very major thing. Since then, 
there’s been an outpouring of work in this area. In my own personal 
inbox, I get two or three manuscripts a day.”

Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel reduces human lives to slim growth 
rings in the bigger history of trees, with characters whose separate 
stories fleetingly intersect as they circle around a series of 
confrontations between individuals and institutions, conscience and 
greed, that will determine the future of humanity. The Canadian writer 
Michael Christie repeated this structure two years later in a lively 
eco-parable Greenwood, set between 1908 and 2038, when a virulent new 
fungus is killing off all trees in what is known as “the great withering”.

At the heart of both novels is a debate about what constitutes life 
itself. In The Overstory, a research scientist is cast into the 
wilderness for daring to suggest that trees have their own forms of 
consciousness and community, while an entrepreneurial computer geek 
realises that they hold the secret to everything. In Greenwood, Jake, a 
tourist guide at a futuristic nature theme park, reflects: “Even when a 
tree is at its most vital, only ten per cent of its tissue – the 
outermost rings, its sapwood – can be called alive. Every tree is held 
up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors.”

FIRST USE SAT REV JUNE 2018 Author Richard S Powers poses for a portrait 
in Great Smokeys National Park in Tennessee near where he lives on 
Tuesday May 22, 2018. Powers’ recently released The Overstory blends 
multiple narratives relating to trees.
‘A very major thing’ ... Richard Powers, in Great Smokeys National Park 
in Tennessee. Photograph: Mike Belleme
This isn’t so fanciful, given the “rights of nature” movement, which 
Robert Macfarlane has described as “the new animism”. Two years ago, 
Macfarlane reported on a move by residents of the US city of Toledo to 
draw up an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Eyrie, granting it legal 
personhood and according it rights in law to “exist, flourish, and 
naturally evolve”. But it wasn’t quite that simple. “Ecosystems are not 
human, and they certainly don’t bear human responsibilities,” argued the 
bill’s organisers. “Rather, nature requires its own unique rights that 
recognise its needs and characteristics.”

The bill revealed just how difficult it is for our existing legal and 
intellectual frameworks to accommodate the idea of a reality beyond the 
human. “The [climate] crisis demands a form of literary expression that 
lifts it out of the realm of intellectual knowing and lodges it deep in 
readers’ bodies,” wrote a perceptive reviewer, in response to an Amazon 
collection of standalone cli-fi stories, Warmer, published in 2018.

So what are the stories we need and how do we unlock them? “There are 
many different kinds of stories one might tell but there are no general 
answers when it comes to novel writing, only specific ones,” says 
Margaret Atwood, whose MaddAddam trilogy explores what might happen in 
the aftermath of environmental collapse. Cli-fi often rests on the 
familiar trope of a nightmarish new reality unleashed by a catastrophic 
event. In John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall, “the change” has 
eroded beaches and made Britain into a fortress state, patrolled by 
young defenders under instruction to destroy any boat that approaches. 
Kate Sawyer’s debut novel, The Stranding, published on 24 June, opens 
with the striking image of two strangers who save themselves from a 
life-obliterating radiation event by sheltering in the mouth of a 
beached whale.

Both The High House and Rumaan Alam’s 2020 hit, Leave the World Behind, 
do something a bit different. Alam strands his characters in a Long 
Island holiday home, cut off from “civilisation” by a cataclysm that 
presents itself as a mysterious noise, a noise so extreme that it seems 
to transcend sound. “You didn’t hear such a noise: you experienced it, 
endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say their lives 
could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and 
the period after,” he writes. In The High House, self-sufficiency is 
made possible by a barn thoughtfully stocked by the scientist mother of 
one of the characters with the tools of a past civilisation – trainers, 
and tinned foods.

Greengrass describes her novel as “a sort of prequel” to Russell Hoban’s 
great dystopian fantasy Riddley Walker, where – in the absence of 
writing materials – language has degraded and mutated. Her East Anglia, 
like Alam’s Long Island, is on the way to becoming a dystopia, without 
actually yet being one. The characters of both novels are trapped 
between the “before” and the “after”, in precisely the sort of limbo 
that makes the environmental breakdown so hard to write about.

Apocalyptic fiction has long thrummed with biblical imagery, from the 
hymn-singing “God’s gardeners” of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the 
Flood to the “burning bush” of orange butterflies in Barbara 
Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. Both The High House and The Stranding 
invoke the story of Noah’s Ark, creating sealed-off family communities 
while implicitly asking what such survival could mean in a world without 
olive trees, or doves.

In the novel Gun Island – his 2019 answer to his own provocation – Ghosh 
deploys myth and mysticism, and the historic movement of languages, 
animals and people around the globe. The novel climaxes in a mass 
migration of whales and dolphins, an implausible freak event that is 
also an observable physical phenomenon. At its heart is a reclamation of 
the “uncanny”, defined by Freud as an effect produced by effacing the 
distinction between imagination and reality.

Alam also uses the uncanny to slice through the hyper-real surface of 
Leave the World Behind, most strikingly with a flock of flamingos that 
land in the backyard swimming pool. “They’re comic and unsettling,” says 
the novelist. “They’re a colour that doesn’t feel like it should exist 
in nature, but of course it does. And they certainly shouldn’t be in the 
American northeast. It’s like coming across a zebra in the middle of 
London. It feels to me a little mythic, a little like the arrival of 
Zeus as a swan.”

It is also a strangely scary visitation. “I think that we have had all 
of these moments in the news that are frightening and strange, and we 
have to think of them as uncanny because they seem to contain something 
that we can’t comprehend right now,” says Alam. He cites shocking images 
of drowned children from refugee boats washed up on beaches. “Those were 
real people, and there is so much heartbreak and shame for us to bear in 
these moments. But there is also something very hard to figure out about 
them: an unexplained child washed up on the shore almost feels like 
something out of folktale.”

Like Gun Island, Leave the World Behind is a deliberately hybrid novel – 
part social comedy, part speculative chiller. Hybridity is emerging as 
one way of addressing the central contradiction between what we are 
(social beings with lives constructed from familiar rituals) and what 
confronts us (an elimination so total that, as Greengrass writes, “there 
won’t be memorials in church halls. No one is going to make up songs. 
There will be nothing left”).

In The Last Migration, the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy slips 
between the magical, the speculative and the domestic in a compelling 
ocean-going yarn that tracks the world’s last migrating birds across the 
high seas, in the hope that they may reveal the whereabouts of the last 
fish. Its narrator, Franny, has a sentimental attachment to one of the 
three tagged arctic terns she is tracking. “I’ve taken to thinking of 
her as mine because she has burrowed inside and made a home in my 
ribcage,” she says, when the reality is that the bird is just a dot on a 
sonar panel, and finally an absence.

Jeff VanderMeer also embraces hybridity in Hummingbird Salamander, 
abandoning his usual speculative fiction to spin a pacy thriller plot 
around a missing eco-terrorist. “Using ‘us’ when thinking about the 
environment erases all the different versions of ‘us’,” writes the 
fugitive Silvina. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. 
Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, 
policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

Other writers have squared up to the narrative challenge by refusing to 
join the dots entirely, as Jenny Offill does so brilliantly in her 
scorching short novel Weather, composed of sometimes random paragraphs. 
Its narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian whose conscience is besieged by 
catastrophe aphorisms (“first they came for the coral, but I did not say 
anything because I was not a coral …”), while her “monkey brain” worries 
about what will happen to her teeth in a world without dentists, and her 
socialised one frets that she might have got lipstick on them.

It is not just overtly cli-fi novels that are investigating 
fragmentation as a way of expressing our state of dismay and disarray. 
In Sarah Moss’s Summerwater, holiday-makers struggle to enjoy themselves 
in unseasonably heavy rain, oblivious to a natural world that exists 
only in the parenthesis of standalone preludes to each chapter: bees 
dying, ants walling themselves in. In Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, 
a lioness tries to keep her cubs safe, a narrative thread related 
outside the stream-of-consciousness of the central character, who spews 
out the minutiae of her life over 1,030 pages.

In their different ways, both Moss and Ellmann are addressing the 
solipsism or self-centredness of consciousness, which got us into this 
problem in the first place, and is both formed and enacted through the 
stories we tell about ourselves. Their characters are prisoners of what 
the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, in a visionary Nobel lecture, 
described as “the polyphonic first-person narrative”, which filters 
everything through the self of the storyteller.

Tokarczuk, who laid out her environmental agenda in her eco-whodunnit 
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, called for a return to the 
perspective of parable, and for the development of what she called a 
“tender narrator”, a quantum version of the omniscient narrator, capable 
of seeing in many dimensions. Quite how this would work she didn’t know, 
because it had yet to be invented. In the meantime, we should abandon 
traditional distinctions between high- and lowbrow fiction and trust to 
fragments. “In this way,” she said, literature can “set off the reader’s 
capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire 
constellations in the small particles of events.”

But as long as we continue to think and to tell stories, we are not 
necessarily doomed. For decades Atwood’s novels have been sounding the 
alarm about things that may not yet be visible, though they are already 
coming to pass. “There is no inevitable The Future, just as there is no 
inevitable Right Side of History. There is no inevitable Road to 
Perdition, there is no inevitable Road to Oz,” she says. “But there are 
consequences of actions, not all of them foreseeable. Dark are the ways 
of wizards. And of novelists as well.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/26/stories-to-save-the-world-the-new-wave-of-climate-fiction



[new book discussion with the author - video]
*Doom: A Conversation with Niall Ferguson on the Politics of Catastrophe*
Jun 17, 2021
Manhattan Institute
As a deadly pandemic and civil unrest swept across the world last year, 
“unprecedented” became the word of the hour. While 2020 was an uncommon 
year, the tendency to think that our time has no historical analogue is 
a common error—one that can have serious consequences if it causes us to 
ignore the lessons of the past.

Niall Ferguson’s new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, offers a 
corrective, arguing that we must understand past calamities to put 
today’s into proper perspective. Investigating the common features of 
geological, geopolitical, biological, and technological disasters, 
Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, offers a general 
theory of catastrophes and explains why our responses to them so often 
falter.

Please join the Manhattan Institute ... for a virtual book talk with 
Niall Ferguson and City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson about Doom, the 
history of catastrophes, and the lessons learned—and forgotten—during 
the Covid-19 crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LeBpTyPEQg


[The news archive - looking back] *
**On this day in the history of global warming June  28, 2015*
June 28, 2015:
In the Washington Post, Columbia University Law Professor Michael B. 
Gerrard observes:

"Toward the end of this century, if current trends are not reversed, 
large parts of Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt 
and Vietnam, among other countries, will be under water. Some small 
island nations, such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, will be close 
to disappearing entirely. Swaths of Africa from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia 
will be turning into desert. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes, on 
which entire regions depend for drinking water, will be melting away. 
Many habitable parts of the world will no longer be able to support 
agriculture or produce clean water.

"The people who live there will not sit passively by while they and 
their children starve to death. Tens or hundreds of millions of people 
will try very hard to go somewhere they can survive. They will be 
hungry, thirsty, hot — and desperate. If the search for safety involves 
piling into perilous boats and enduring miserable and dangerous 
journeys, they will do it. They will cross borders, regardless of 
whether they are welcome. And in their desperation, they could become 
violent: Forced migration can exacerbate ethnic and political tensions. 
Studies show that more heat tends to increase violence.

"The United Nations says the maximum tolerable increase in global 
average temperatures is 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial 
conditions. (Small island nations argued for a much lower figure; at 3.6 
degrees, they’ll be gone.) But the promises that nations are making 
ahead of the U.N. climate summit in Paris in December would still, 
according to the International Energy Agency, lead the average 
temperature to rise by about 4.7 degrees before the end of the century. 
Those promises are voluntary and nonbinding, and if they aren’t kept, 
the thermometer could go much higher. Which means our children and 
grandchildren will be confronting a humanitarian crisis unlike anything 
the world has ever faced.

"Absent the political will to prevent it, the least we can do is to 
start planning for it.

"Rather than leaving vast numbers of victims of a warmer world stranded, 
without any place allowing them in, industrialized countries ought to 
pledge to take on a share of the displaced population equal to how much 
each nation has historically contributed to emissions of the greenhouse 
gases that are causing this crisis."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-the-worst-polluter-in-the-history-of-the-world-we-should-let-climate-change-refugees-resettle-here/2015/06/25/28a55238-1a9c-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html 



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information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
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