[TheClimate.Vote] March 29, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 29, 2021*/

[DW news analysis - video 26 min]
*Polar power play: Who will win the race for the Arctic's riches? | To 
the Point*
Mar 19, 2021
DW News
Who does the Arctic belong to? The vast region was long seen as little 
more than snow and ice.
But now three world powers – Russia, China and the United States – are 
leading the charge to take control of the immense natural resources and 
new trade routes that are opening up, even as a potential climate 
catastrophe takes hold. So, on To the Point, we ask: "Who will win the 
race for the Arctic's riches?"
Guests this week are Michael Paul (security expert), Stefan Rahmstorf 
(climatologist), Irina Filatova (DW's Russian desk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvK6IstZs8M


[Washington Post ]
*Opinion: Global warming is endangering more than we think. We must adjust.*
March 26, 2021

THE WORLD’S climate depends on a global aquatic “conveyor belt” system 
that snakes around the oceans, taking heat from some places and 
redistributing it elsewhere. It is this system that keeps Europe 
relatively warm despite its northern latitudes, underpins major 
fisheries and drives key weather patterns across continents.

Global warming may be endangering this crucial circulation. Scientists 
are accumulating evidence that climate change is disrupting a major 
section of the conveyor belt, running from the tropics up to the North 
Atlantic and back south, slowing this piece of the system to its weakest 
pace in more than 1,000 years, according to a study published in the 
journal Nature Geoscience. By changing the atmosphere’s chemistry at a 
breakneck pace, humanity is conducting a massive, unprecedented 
experiment on finely tuned planetary systems, with consequences that 
range from predictable to speculative, and what experts know about Earth 
history offers little comfort for what awaits.

A group of scientists from Britain, Germany and Ireland studying the 
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — that is, the circulation 
pattern that warms the North Atlantic — have sought to compare how it is 
behaving now with its recent past. Experts only began directly measuring 
the pattern in 2004, so they looked for clues in seafloor sediments and 
ocean temperature patterns, which suggested how the currents behaved 
before. The clues present a consistent picture: The circulation has 
weakened in a way that is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years, said 
Niamh Cahill, a statistician from Ireland’s Maynooth University.

The scientists believe the ultimate cause is global warming. The 
circulation occurs because warm tropical water cools and becomes saltier 
as it travels north, which makes it denser. This dense water eventually 
sinks to the bottom of the ocean, then travels south, where it is once 
again heated in another part of the cycle. Higher rainfall, lower 
amounts of sea ice and ice melting on the Greenland ice sheet are adding 
far more fresh water than usual to the system, making the water up north 
less salty and, thus, less dense and less prone to sink, undermining the 
circulation. This may account for a giant stretch of unusually cold 
water that has stubbornly persisted near Greenland and for unusually 
high water temperatures on the U.S. East Coast.

The study’s authors warn that climate change may further destabilize the 
Atlantic circulation over coming decades. The consequences are hard to 
predict with precision, in part because warming air might offset some of 
the cooling associated with slower circulation. But previous research 
suggests that the last time the circulation was severely destabilized, 
some 12,000 years ago, Europe was slammed with bitter winters and, 
because of how the circulation interacts with air, severe summer heat 
and droughts.

Climate change is not some isolated change in the air temperature. It 
encompasses sea-level rise, heavy storms, heat waves, droughts, 
wildfires, acidifying oceans and disruptions in the sensitive planetary 
rhythms on which human society developed. Scientists know some things 
for sure — the planet will warm because of greenhouse gas emissions, 
with a variety of negative results. But they have not catalogued all the 
consequences. Some are only just coming clearly into view, and some 
remain obscure. The longer we humans fail to adjust our behavior, the 
worse the consequences are likely to be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-warming-is-endangering-more-than-we-think-we-must-adjust/2021/03/26/1a963fc0-77cc-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html


[serious statement ]
*What Is Climate Feminism?*
Natural Resources Defense Council - Mar. 27, 2021
By Nicole Greenfield

The climate crisis disproportionately impacts women—and women of color 
in particular. This is why women must lead on its solutions.

Last fall, two powerful hurricanes, Eta and Iota, slammed into Central 
America within two weeks of each other, causing massive flooding and 
landslides and affecting millions of people, primarily in Honduras and 
Nicaragua. Thousands were uprooted from their homes, and women, many 
with children in tow, suffered the greatest. The events followed a 
disturbing but familiar trend: The United Nations estimates that 80 
percent of people displaced by climate change are women. And it's not 
just storms that affect them; researchers in India have found that 
droughts, too, hit women the hardest, rendering them more vulnerable 
than men to income loss, food insecurity, water scarcity, and related 
health complications.

"The climate crisis is not gender neutral," says Katharine K. Wilkinson, 
coeditor of the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions 
for the Climate Crisis, a book of essays and poems written entirely by 
women contributors. "It grows out of a patriarchal system that is also 
entangled with racism and white supremacy and extractive capitalism. And 
the unequal impacts of climate change are making it harder to achieve a 
gender-equal world."

In the face of this reality, the world needs to embrace a feminist 
approach to tackling the climate crisis, she adds. That includes a 
collective mission to shift who is leading the way on solutions to the 
crisis, and what the approach will be.

*A Multiplier of Injustice*
"The intersections of climate and justice and feminism include the 
disproportionate impact of climate change and the entire climate 
continuum on women," says Jacqueline Patterson, director of the NAACP 
Environmental and Climate Justice Program. "We also add the race lens, 
of course, and the additional risks that are unique to BIPOC women and, 
most specifically, Black women."

Climate change developed in an unjust world, and now it's exacerbating 
the vulnerabilities and inequalities experienced by women, particularly 
those who live in rural areas or the Global South and those who are 
Black, Indigenous, or other people of color. Patterson reflects on this 
injustice in the essay "At the Intersections," which appears in the All 
We Can Save collection. She opens with an anecdote about the first time 
she saw racism, misogyny, and poverty collide with environmental issues 
as a Peace Corps volunteer in her father's homeland of Jamaica. Later in 
her career, as a human rights activist working internationally to combat 
HIV/AIDS and gender injustice, Patterson learned the story of a woman 
who left her native Cameroon because the crops in her community had 
dried up, only to become a victim of rape and then to contract HIV at 
the country's border. "These stories drew my tears," she writes. "There 
is a pandemic of devastating impacts at the intersection between 
violence against women and climate change."

These days in her environmental justice work with the NAACP, Patterson 
is committed to ensuring that communities in "grindingly desperate 
circumstances, communities that aren't even thought about," like those 
without running water or electricity, for example, aren't left out of 
the climate conversation. And that means not just including them, but 
deliberately prioritizing them and ensuring their voices are heard on 
all levels. She asks, "How do we make sure we don't continue with the 
ills of the past in terms of assuming the rising tide will lift all boats?"

*“A Feminist Climate Renaissance”*
According to Wilkinson, these injustices of the climate crisis also 
highlight a leadership crisis. What we truly need, she and All We Can 
Save coeditor Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, write, is a 
"feminist climate renaissance." Without this, a just and liveable future 
becomes impossible. "Research shows that women's leadership and equal 
participation result in better outcomes for climate policy, reducing 
emissions, and protecting land," Wilkinson adds.

Indeed, many of today's most influential climate leaders are women. On 
the international stage, Christiana Figueres, as the head of the United 
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was the architect of the 
historic 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which in its preamble called out 
the need to empower women in climate decision making. Celebrities like 
Jane Fonda have brought attention to the climate crisis through civil 
disobedience and Fire Drill Fridays—inspired, of course, by the activism 
of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and the powerful Fridays for Future 
movement she began. Female government officials are likewise leading on 
climate. New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, recently declared 
a climate change emergency and committed her country to going 
carbon-neutral by 2025. Meanwhile in the United States, representative 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the visionary behind the Green New Deal, a 
plan for the country to move away from fossil fuels and toward a 
clean-energy future. And over the past few years, groups like the 
Sunrise Movement, led by Varshini Prakash, have done critical work 
inserting the climate crisis into American public discourse.

Wilkinson and Johnson see four main characteristics shared by leaders 
like these. First and foremost, they prioritize making change over being 
in charge. "We need to get over ego, competition, and control—all that 
patriarchal, supremacist, hierarchical stuff that gets in the way, burns 
a lot of energy, and keeps us from collaborating," Wilkinson says.

Feminist climate leaders also tend to have a deep commitment to justice 
and equality. Having emotional intelligence is necessary, too. "This is 
the biggest challenge humanity has ever grappled with, and we're not 
going to solve it from our prefrontal cortex alone," Wilkinson declares. 
"We need to come to this as whole human beings. And that means the 
grief, the uncertainty, the rage, the anxiety, but also the really 
ferocious love."

Last, feminist climate leaders recognize that building community is a 
prerequisite for building a better world. Community holds incredible 
wisdom, while "individualism comes up short on good ideas, and certainly 
on a sense of purpose and joy," Wilkinson says. Nurturing that sense of 
community in the broad climate movement is often a first step, 
especially when uniting allies from disparate groups. As Gulf Coast 
Center for Law & Policy founder Colette Pichon Battle advises, before 
diverse groups of women can stand on the front lines together, they must 
heal the relationships and reconcile the unjust social dynamics that 
exist between their various communities.

The good news is that women are uniquely prepared to take on this social 
and environmental healing work. "Women have had to develop a coping and 
a nurturing set of skills in order to see the survival of our families," 
Patterson says, adding that caring for a family under the most dire of 
circumstances has been bred into the DNA of Black women, who carry the 
trauma of slavery. "Women have just had to," she says.

For her part, Wilkinson says that she sees evidence of the growth and 
power of the feminist climate ecosystem every time she turns around. 
Leaders in the youth climate justice movement embody these 
characteristics, and increasing numbers of women are getting a seat at 
the national table (including former NRDC president Gina McCarthy, 
another All We Can Save contributor, who is now steering domestic 
climate policy from the White House). "There are lots of signs that this 
galloping herd is getting bigger and faster and stronger. And that gives 
me a lot of courage," Wilkinson says.

*Power and Joy*
For their nonprofit All We Can Save Project, Wilkinson and Johnson have 
developed a 2030 vision for women leading on climate to hold the power 
to create transformational change and experience deep joy in their work. 
Their community-minded approach to solving the climate crisis 
prioritizes the collective lifting of one another's spirits and helps 
build momentum—both of which serve as an antidote to the gloom that can 
sometimes consume the lone climate warrior. "We're really into this idea 
of power and joy," Wilkinson explains. "Power is what you need to make 
change happen. And joy is frankly what you need to keep showing up every 
day."

With climate feminists at the helm, more resources and investments could 
be procured for the transformational climate work that cisgender and 
trans women and nonbinary leaders are already doing—developing 
solutions, researching and writing, doing community organizing—often at 
night or on the weekends. These leaders and their teams can also serve 
as examples and mentors for emerging climate feminists of all genders 
and ages.

And of course, men can be climate feminists too. "There's a really 
important role for men, and I think it starts with listening," Wilkinson 
says. "And when we consider core approaches to climate leadership, 
things like compassion, connection, creativity, collaboration, care, a 
commitment to justice, all of that is open to people of any gender." She 
notes that men in positions of power—whether they control funding or 
platforms or lead an institution—can be more intentional in helping to 
change the face of climate leadership. They can extend invitations to 
more women and to others from diverse backgrounds to bring forth ideas 
and lead projects, or they can step back and let others make decisions 
and set the vision.

Such collaborative work is increasingly urgent. "Even now, at the 11th 
hour for climate action, so many people in power are denying, blocking, 
and delaying, or putting forward hollow promises about what they're 
going to do," says Wilkinson. "It's absolutely devastating. But I do 
think the tide is turning. I think we will win."

She adds that Ireland's former and first female president Mary Robinson 
sums up the situation perfectly with the tagline to her Mothers of 
Invention podcast: "Climate change is a man-made problem—with a feminist 
solution!"
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-climate-feminism



[Uh oh... could that be so?]
*Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon*
Is it really just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way 
of life or to get “back to normal?”
By Sarah Jaquette Ray on March 21, 2021
People of color are disproportionately harmed by climate change, but 
whites disproportionately fret publicly about it...
The climate movement is ascendant, and it has become common to see 
climate change as a social justice issue. Climate change and its 
effects—pandemics, pollution, natural disasters—are not universally or 
uniformly felt: the people and communities suffering most are 
disproportionately Black, Indigenous and people of color. It is no 
surprise then that U.S. surveys show that these are the communities most 
concerned about climate change.

One year ago, I published a book called A Field Guide to Climate 
Anxiety. Since its publication, I have been struck by the fact that 
those responding to the concept of climate anxiety are overwhelmingly 
white. Indeed, these climate anxiety circles are even whiter than the 
environmental circles I’ve been in for decades. Today, a year into the 
pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that 
followed, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, I am deeply concerned 
about the racial implications of climate anxiety. If people of color are 
more concerned about climate change than white people, why is the 
interest in climate anxiety so white? Is climate anxiety a form of white 
fragility or even racial anxiety? Put another way, is climate anxiety 
just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get 
“back to normal,” to the comforts of their privilege?

The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people 
of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up 
all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the 
dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security 
threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing 
people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates 
tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, 
limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, 
deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make 
sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?
My book has connected me to a growing community focused on the emotional 
dimensions of climate change. As writer Britt Wray puts it, emotions 
like mourning, anger, dread and anxiety are “merely a sign of our 
attachment to the world.” Paradoxically, though, anxiety about 
environmental crisis can create apathy, inaction and burnout. Anxiety 
may be a rational response to the world that climate models predict, but 
it is unsustainable.
And climate panic can be as dangerous as it is galvanizing. Dealing with 
feelings of climate anxiety will require the existential tools I 
provided in A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, but it will also require 
careful attention to extremism and climate zealotry. We can’t fight 
climate change with more racism. Climate anxiety must be directed toward 
addressing the ways that racism manifests as environmental trauma and 
vice versa—how environmentalism manifests as racialized violence. We 
need to channel grief toward collective liberation.

The prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional 
terrain for Black and brown people, whether that terrain is racism or 
climate change. Climate change compounds existing structures of 
injustice, and those structures exacerbate climate change. Exhaustion, 
anger, hope—the effects of oppression and resistance are not unique to 
this climate moment. What is unique is that people who had been 
insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own 
unlivable future.

It is a surprisingly short step from “chronic fear of environmental 
doom,” as the American Psychological Association defines ecoanxiety, to 
xenophobia and fascism. Racism is not an accidental byproduct of 
environmentalism; it has been a constant reference point. As I wrote 
about in my first book, The Ecological Other, early environmentalists in 
the U.S. were anti-immigrant eugenicists whose ideas were later adopted 
by Nazis to implement their “blood and soil” ideology. In a recent, 
dramatic example, the gunman of the 2019 El Paso shooting was motivated 
by despair about the ecological fate of the planet: “My whole life I 
have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.” Intense 
emotions mobilize people, but not always for the good of all life on 
this planet.

Today’s progressives espouse climate change as the “greatest existential 
threat of our time,” a claim that ignores people who have been 
experiencing existential threats for much longer. Slavery, colonialism, 
ongoing police brutality—we can’t neglect history to save the future.

*RESILIENCE AND RELATION AS RESISTANCE*
I recently gave a college lecture about climate anxiety. One of the 
students e-mailed me to say she was so distressed that she’d be willing 
to submit to a green dictator if they would address climate change. 
Young people know the stakes, but they are not learning how to cope with 
the intensity of their dread. It would be tragic and dangerous if this 
generation of climate advocates becomes willing to sacrifice democracy 
and human rights in the name of climate change.

Oppressed and marginalized people have developed traditions of 
resilience out of necessity. Black, feminist and Indigenous leaders have 
painstakingly cultivated resilience over the long arc of the fight for 
justice. They know that protecting joy and hope is the ultimate 
resistance to domination. Persistence is nonnegotiable when your mental, 
physical and reproductive health are on the line.
Instead of asking “What can I do to stop feeling so anxious?”, “What can 
I do to save the planet?” and “What hope is there?”, people with 
privilege can be asking “Who am I?” and “How am I connected to all of 
this?” The answers reveal that we are deeply interconnected with the 
well-being of others on this planet, and that there are traditions of 
environmental stewardship that can be guides for where we need to go 
from here.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/

- -

[the book]
*A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming 
Planet *
by Sarah Jaquette Ray  (Author) published April 21, 2020

    Gen Z's first "existential toolkit" for combating eco-guilt and
    burnout while advocating for climate justice.
    A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The
    “climate generation”—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is
    demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate
    action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science.
    Those inheriting our planet’s environmental problems expect to
    encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple
    with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when
    they confront this seemingly intractable situation.

    Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college
    environmental studies programs, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an
    “existential tool kit” for the climate generation. Combining
    insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness,
    and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need
    to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience
    while advocating for climate justice. A Field Guide to Climate
    Anxiety is the essential guidebook for the climate generation—and
    perhaps the rest of us—as we confront the greatest environmental
    threat of our time.

https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Climate-Anxiety-Warming/dp/0520343301/ref=sr_1_1_sspa



[Arctic travelers watch out]
*As the Arctic warms, lightning strikes are more frequent -- even near 
the North Pole*
By Allison Chinchar and Haley Brink, CNN Meteorologists
March 28, 2021
(CNN)The Arctic is not usually a hotbed for lightning -- the air is 
simply not warm enough for thunderstorms to usually occur. But as the 
Arctic warms at an alarming rate, that lightning frequency is changing 
as well.

In fact, Arctic lightning has tripled in just the last decade, according 
to a new study, published this week in the Geophysical Research Letters.
The University of Washington study used data collected by its network of 
lightning sensors, called the World Wide Lightning Location Network 
(WWLLN), which has been tracking lightning strokes globally since 2004. 
The data showed that above 65 degrees latitude the number of lightning 
strikes has increased significantly from 2010 to 2020...
While the study focused on areas inside the Arctic Circle -- northern 
portions of Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and the central Arctic 
Ocean -- not all of those areas had equal results.
Lightning induced wildfires
In the Arctic Circle there was an even greater increase in lightning 
strikes in the Eastern Hemisphere, specifically over Siberia.
This is likely because lightning is more likely to occur over ice-free 
land than over oceans or over large ice sheets such as Greenland or even 
Antarctica, explains Robert H. Holzworth, one of the authors of the 
research letter and a professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the 
University of Washington.
"Thunderstorms occur when there is differential surface heating, so an 
updraft-downdraft convection can occur," Holzworth says. "You need a 
warm moist updraft to get a thunderstorm started, and that is more 
likely to occur over ice free land than land covered with ice."
This is concerning because an area in northern Russia has also seen an 
uptick in wildfires in recent years. However, just because the lightning 
count has increased doesn't mean it will always trigger lightning 
induced wildfires.
Both northern Siberia and Canada are covered in a thick forest of trees, 
which are highly flammable. So the ingredients are already in place to 
induce lightning-triggered wildfires. However just because the lightning 
in the area has increased threefold does not mean that wildfires have 
increased at this same rate.
Conversely, there are also indirect impacts from the wildfires to 
consider. Wildfires emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that 
warm the planet.
"In Arctic and boreal forest ecosystems, fires burn organic carbon 
stored in the soils and hasten the melting of permafrost, which release 
methane, another greenhouse gas, when thawed," according to NASA.
Additionally, wildfire smoke can travel hundreds of miles in the 
atmosphere. It contains a number of pollutants including carbon 
monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and solid aerosol 
particles. So the potential for hazardous conditions is not just for 
local populations but also for those further away.
A warming climate likely to blame
The Arctic has been warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the 
planet. This warming in the Arctic tundra has led to more thunderstorm 
development which has produced more electrical discharge -- lightning.
- -
data displays - 
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/210325181740-arctic-lightning-increase-bar-chart-uw-exlarge-169.jpg
https://ix.cnn.io/dailygraphics/graphics/20210326-arctic-lightning/static/media/ai2html-graphic-desktop.4339d65a.jpg
- -
"The tundra in Siberia is melting, with mastodon tusks appearing, etc., 
and this is indicative of the warming ground, giving new opportunities 
for differential heating to show up, and thunderstorms to grow over the 
Eastern Hemisphere Arctic more so than the Western Arctic," Holzworth said.
In August 2019, there was one particularly unique event in which nearly 
30 strikes were registered less than about 60 miles from the North Pole. 
This was a "major convective event" and it was unique to have lightning 
that close to the North Pole, according to the study.
The image above shows that the fraction of global lightning has 
increased by more than a factor of three during the summer. It 
demonstrates the strong similarity between the fraction of strikes and 
the three month average global summer temperature anomaly. So while 
global temperatures may not be the entire cause for the increased 
lightning strike count, there is certainly a connection.
It is important to note that during the 11-year period studied there was 
also an increase in the number of WWLLN data stations. While this would 
naturally cause an increase in the number of strikes observed, this 
alone could not fully explain the substantial increase in lightning 
strikes across the Arctic.
Zamira Rahim contributed to this story
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/28/weather/weather-lightning-arctic-climate/index.html



[Beckwith video lecture]
*Climate System Tipping Point Sequence: Amazon Rainforest Collapse a 
Decent First Place Bet: 3 of 3*
Mar 28, 2021
Paul Beckwith
Please donate to http://paulbeckwith.net​ to support my research and 
videos as I join the scientific dots on abrupt climate system change.

In my last few videos I chatted about how our terrestrial biosphere sink 
is failing. Presently, land vegetation absorbs about 30% of 
anthropogenic carbon emissions, but with BAU (Business-as-Usual) this 
number is expected to halve by 2040. The terrestrial biosphere will tip 
over from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source. CO2 concentrations 
in the atmosphere will skyrocket as we head there within a mere two 
decades. The reason is that further warming increases plant respiration 
while decreasing plant photosynthesis. Sources dominate sinks.

Of course the Amazon Rainforest is the largest swath of tropical 
rainforest on the planet. This forest drives a partially self-sustaining 
regional climate and hydrological system, whereby falling rainwater is 
taken up by rainforest, a lot of the water is put back into the 
atmosphere by evapotranspiration, and the cycle repeats over and over 
again. Thus, water is distributed over the entire rainforest, but if the 
cycle is cut off at the start then the entire rainforest can suffer 
severe drought. Thus, with slightly more warming from climate system 
change, we are at great risk of the sudden complete collapse of the 
entire rainforest.

In this video series (3 parts) I focus on the Amazon Rainforest. I chat 
about a new scientific review paper called “Carbon and Beyond: The 
Biogeochemistry of Climate in a Rapidly Changing Amazon”. Most 
discussions of the Amazon Rainforest focus solely on carbon cycles and 
storage. This is incomplete; they need to consider the overall Amazon 
system, and also examine CH4, N2O, black carbon, biogenic volatile 
organic compounds, aerosols, evapotranspiration, and albedo changes. The 
dynamic responses of all of the above to localized stresses (fires, 
land-use changes, extreme weather events) and to global stresses 
(warming, drying, El Niño Southern Oscillation) must be examined to get 
a more complete understanding of the Amazon System.

When the overall system is studied, it becomes quite clear that the CH4 
and N2O changes are large enough to offset, and even actually exceed the 
carbon sink of the Amazon Rainforest. This is actually terrible news for 
the vitality of our planetary ecosystems and human societies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyZZnrEdTdI



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 29, 2009 *

December 29, 2009: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates members 
of the US Senate who have developed cold feet about addressing global 
warming:

    "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are waving off the
    idea of serious action in 2010. But not because they're opposed. Oh,
    heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns over the political
    difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), for
    instance, avers that 'climate change in an election year has very
    poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true, though it is odd to say
    that the American system of governance can only solve problems every
    other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says that 'we need to deal with
    the phenomena of global warming,' but wants to wait until the
    economy is fixed.

    "Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing this,
    Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying things
    like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation as
    legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
    about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
    do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
    them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and goodwill
    built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money on TV ads
    in their state, talking directly into the camera, explaining to
    their constituents that they don't like having to face this problem,
    but see no choice. That effort might fail -- probably will, in fact
    -- but it's got a better chance of success than not trying. And this
    is, well, pretty important."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html 




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