[✔️] April 5, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Apr 5 09:21:17 EDT 2022
/*April 5, 2022*/
/[ video recording of IPCC press conference from Monday] /
*CLIMATE CHANGE 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change*
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STFoSxqFQXU
- -
/[ Opinion from Nexus Hot News]/
*IPCC Report: Fossil Fuels Must End To Prevent 'Unlivable World'*:
Humanity must act quickly and decisively to avert the worst
climate-fueled disasters — and it has the technological and economic
tools to do so, if entrenched "status quo" actors and political barriers
can be overcome, the world's top body of climate scientists said
yesterday. Humanity must phase out fossil fuel extraction and combustion
and immediately cease constructing new fossil fuel infrastructure, the
UN's IPCC report said. Pledges by the world's governments, even if
fulfilled, will not limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial
levels, and the report represents "a litany of broken climate promises …
a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on
track toward an unlivable world,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
told reporters...
- -
Often described as "low-hanging fruit," immediate action to plug methane
leaks from gas wells, pipelines, and stoves are some of the most
efficient ways to limit near-term warming because methane traps heat so
much more potently than carbon dioxide but stays in the atmosphere for a
much shorter period of time. The report, and its authors, also stressed
the necessity of equitably cutting greenhouse gas emissions and
implementing carbon drawdown policies. "If you do that at the expense of
justice, of poverty eradication and the inclusion of people," Fatima
Denton, one of the report's 278 authors, told Thomson Reuters, "then
you're back at the starting block."
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20220405-ipcc-ar6-wg3-french-wine-valley-fever
- -
/[ Associated Press to ABC news]/
*No obituary for Earth: Scientists fight climate doom talk*
Scientists say climate change is bad, and getting worse, but it is not
game over for planet Earth or humanity..
By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer
April 4, 2022,
It’s not the end of the world. It only seems that way.
Climate change is going to get worse, but as gloomy as the latest
scientific reports are, including today’s from the United Nations,
scientist after scientist stresses that curbing global warming is not
hopeless. The science says it is not game over for planet Earth or
humanity. Action can prevent some of the worst if done soon, they say...
- -
“We are not doomed, but rapid action is absolutely essential,” Andersen
said. “With every month or year that we delay action, climate change
becomes more complex, expensive and difficult to overcome.”
“The big message we’ve got (is that) human activities got us into this
problem and human agency can actually get us out of it again,” James
Skea, co-chair of Monday’s report, said. “It’s not all lost. We really
have the chance to do something.”
Monday’s report details that it is unlikely, without immediate and
drastic carbon pollution cuts, that the world will limit warming to 1.5
degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times,
which is the world’s agreed upon goal. The world has already warmed 1.1
degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). And earlier IPCC reports have
shown that after 1.5 degrees, more people die, more ecosystems are in
trouble and climate change worsens rapidly.
“We don’t fall over the cliff at 1.5 degrees," Skea said, "Even if we
were to go beyond 1.5 it doesn’t mean we throw up our hands in despair.”
IPCC reports showed that depending on how much coal, oil, and natural
gas is burned, warming by 2100 could be anywhere from 1.4 to 4.4 degrees
Celsius (2.5 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times,
which can mean large differences in sickness, death and weather disasters.
While he sees the increase in doom talk as inevitable, NASA climate
scientist Gavin Schmidt said he knows first-hand that people are wrong
when they say nothing can be done: “I work with people and I’m watching
other people and I’m seeing the administration. And people are doing
things and they’re doing the right things for the most part as best they
can. So I’m seeing people do things.”
Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said
scientists used to think Earth would be committed to decades of future
warming even after people stopped pumping more carbon dioxide into the
air than nature takes out. But newer analyses in recent years show it
will only take a few years after net zero emissions for carbon levels in
the air to start to go down because of carbon being sucked up by the
oceans and forests, Mann said.
Scientists' legitimate worries get repeated and amplified like in the
kids game of telephone and “by the time you’re done, it’s ‘we’re doomed’
when what the scientist actually said was we need to reduce or carbon
emissions 50% within this decade to avoid 1.5 (degrees of) warming,
which would be really bad. Two degrees of warming would be far worse
than 1.5 warming, but not the end of civilization," Mann said.
Mann said doomism has become far more of a threat than denialism and he
believes that some of the same people, trade associations and companies
that denied climate change are encouraging people who say it is too late.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/obituary-earth-scientists-fight-climate-doom-talk-83867228
- -
/[ a major release from IPCC -- these are some notes from Climate Nexus ]/
*Climate Nexus Messaging to Greet the IPCC WG3 Report*
Monday, April 4, 2022
The big takeaways: We must ramp down fossil fuels, quickly and
dramatically, and start phasing out existing fossil fuel infrastructure.
This is a significant shift for the IPCC.
- -2025 is now a make-or-break year. The IPCC finds that globally we
must reach peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 in order to limit
warming to 1.5°C, and that delaying a peak past 2025 means unavoidable
and unnecessary economic losses...
- -
*Talking Points*
This report is both a storm warning and a rescue beacon. And it may be
the final report by the IPCC that will matter.
By the time the next IPCC report on the pathways forward is published,
7-8 years from now, we will already know whether we secured a decent
chance for a sustainable future - or if we face a devil’s bargain that
offers only ruinous costs no matter which way we go from there.
We’re in a deep hole. This report makes clear that operating just our
current fossil fuel infrastructure will drive warming above 1.5°C. In
order to meet a 1.5°C target, the report finds that we will need to
decommission many existing fossil fuel power plants and cancel most new
fossil fuel infrastructure in the power sector, and that fossil fuels
largely need to be phased out. The takeaway here is clear: no more
fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States. And subsidies for
fossil fuels must end. The best time to stop digging ourselves into a
deeper hole was yesterday; the next-best time to stop digging is today.
Time is of the essence. The faster we move to reduce climate-harming
pollution, the more likely we are to effectively limit warming to 1.5°C.
Reducing methane pollution from our energy system provides one of the
biggest bangs for our buck: We already have the technological capability
to act quickly and cost-effectively to eliminate most leaks and other
fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas production.
2025 is the key year. The IPCC finds we must reach peak greenhouse gas
emissions globally by 2025 in order to limit warming to 1.5°C, and that
delaying a peak past 2025 means unavoidable and unnecessary economic losses.
The primary barriers to making the switch to clean energy are political.
They are not technical or economic....
https://climatenexus.org
- -
/[ too few agree with reality ]/
*5 Takeaways From the U.N. Report on Limiting Global Warming*
Current pledges to cut emissions, even if nations follow through on
them, won’t stop temperatures from rising to risky new levels.
By Raymond Zhong - - April 4, 2022
Nations are not doing nearly enough to prevent global warming from
increasing to dangerous levels within the lifetimes of most people on
Earth today, according to a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, a group of researchers convened by the United Nations.
Limiting the devastation won’t be easy, but it also isn’t impossible if
countries act now, the report says.
The panel produces a comprehensive overview of climate science once
every six to eight years. It splits its findings into three reports. The
first, on what’s driving global warming, came out last August. The
second, on climate change’s effects on our world and our ability to
adapt to them, was released in February. This is No. 3, on how we can
cut emissions and limit further warming.
*Without swift action, we’re headed for trouble.*
The report makes it clear: Nations’ current pledges to curb
greenhouse-gas emissions most likely will not stop global warming from
exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, within the
next few decades. And that’s assuming countries follow through. If they
don’t, even more warming is in store.
That target — to prevent the average global temperature from increasing
by 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels — is one many world
governments have agreed to pursue. It sounds modest. But that number
represents a host of sweeping changes that occur as greenhouse gases
trap more heat on the planet’s surface, including deadlier storms, more
intense heat waves, rising seas and extra strain on crops. Earth has
already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius on average since the 19th
century...
- -
On the whole, it is the richest people and wealthiest nations that are
heating up the planet. Worldwide, the richest 10 percent of households
are responsible for between a third to nearly half of all greenhouse gas
emissions, according to the report. The poorest 50 percent of households
contribute around 15 percent of emissions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/climate/ipcc-report-explained.html
/[ Scientist speaking up -- text ]
/*I’m a Scientist in California. Drought Is Worse Than We Thought.*
By Andrew Schwartz - April 4, 2022
Dr. Schwartz is the lead scientist and station manager at the University
of California, Berkeley, Central Sierra Snow Lab./../
/- -
/Droughts may last for several years or even over a decade with varying
degrees of severity. During these types of extended droughts, soil can
become so dry that it soaks up all new water, which reduces runoff to
streams and reservoirs. Soil can also become so dry that the surface
becomes hard and repels water, which can cause rainwater to pour off the
land quickly and cause flooding. This means we no longer can rely on
relatively short periods of rain or snow to completely relieve drought
conditions the way we did with past droughts./
//- -
/Many storms with near record-breaking amounts of rain or snow would be
required in a single year to make a significant dent in drought
conditions. October was the second snowiest and December was the
snowiest month on record at the snow lab since 1970 thanks to two
atmospheric rivers that hit California. But the exceptionally dry
November and January to March periods have left us with another year of
below average snowpack, rain and runoff conditions.
This type of feast-or-famine winter with big storms and long, severe dry
periods is expected to increase as climate change continues. As a
result, we’ll need multiple above-average rain and snow years to make up
the difference rather than consecutive large events in a single year.
Even with normal or above-average precipitation years, changes to the
land surface present another complication. Massive wildfires, such as
those that we’ve seen in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in recent
years, cause distinct changes in the way that snow melts and that water,
including rain, runs off the landscape. The loss of forest canopy from
fires can result in greater wind speeds and temperatures, which increase
evaporation and decrease the amount of snow water reaching reservoirs...
- -
We are looking down the barrel of a loaded gun with our water resources
in the West. Rather than investing in body armor, we’ve been hoping that
the trigger won’t be pulled. The current water monitoring and modeling
strategies aren’t sufficient to support the increasing number of people
that need water. I’m worried about the next week, month, year, and about
new problems that we’ll inevitably face as climate change continues and
water becomes more unpredictable.
It’s time for policymakers who allocate funding to invest in updating
our water models rather than maintaining the status quo and hoping for
the best. Large-scale investment in the agencies that maintain and
develop these models is paramount to preparing for the future of water
in the West.
Better water models ultimately mean more accurate management of water,
and that will lead to greater water security and availability for the
millions of people who now depend on the changing water supply. It is an
investment in our future and, further, an investment in our continued
ability to inhabit the water-scarce regions in the West. It’s the only
way to ensure that we’re prepared when the trigger is pulled./
/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/opinion/environment/california-drought-wildfires.html
- -
/[ Data source for snowpack ]/
*Snow Surveys*
Established in 1929 by the California Legislature, the California
Cooperative Snow Surveys (CCSS) program is a partnership of more than 50
state, federal, and private agencies. The cooperating agencies not only
share a pool of expert staff but share in funding the program, which
collects, analyzes and disseminates snow data from more than 265 snow
courses and 130 snow sensors located throughout the Sierra Nevada and
Shasta-Trinity mountains.
https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Flood-Management/Flood-Data/Snow-Surveys
/[ calling for wisdom ]/
*Poor policy and short-sightedness: how the budget treats climate change
and energy in the wake of disasters*
March 30, 2022
- -
From the devastating bushfires of 2019-2020 to this year’s shocking
floods, unprecedented climate-related disasters have wrought havoc
across Australia.
It is deeply regretful that the budget and forward estimates do not
specifically recognise the ongoing, and escalating, scale and the fiscal
impact of these disasters...
- -
*Short-term climate thinking*
Frydenberg’s budget acknowledged the devastation wrought in Australia by
floods, drought and bushfires. Yet it failed to acknowledge the future
cost of such disasters on the budget under climate change.
The budget includes measures to make regional Australia more resilient,
to mitigate the impact of these disasters and support insurance
coverage. But these are short-term commitments.
Even if we manage to stop global warming beyond 1.5℃ this century, the
frequency and severity of natural disasters will only worsen. Australia
is already feeling the damage.
The economic and fiscal consequences of these disasters will only
increase. And there will be other risks from a changing climate such as
rising health spending and reduced government revenues from key exports,
including liquefied natural gas.
*So what should the government do differently?*
At the very least, the federal government should move to better
understand and quantify the fiscal risks from climate change.
First, it should include some of the immediate risks of climate change
in the budget’s “Statement of Risks”, which outlines the general fiscal
risks that may affect the budget.
Second, it should adjust medium-term fiscal projection models to factor
in declining revenue from fossil fuels, higher cost of debt, and higher
expenditure on health and natural disaster supports.
Third, the longer-term impacts of climate change on the budget must be
modelled. This should inform the next Intergenerational Report in 2025,
which provides an economic outlook for Australia over coming decades.
Climate change ultimately challenges governments to reconsider their
fiscal strategy. The many climate-related uncertainties make a strong
case for preserving fiscal flexibility and firepower to cushion the
direct impacts of climate change, including natural disasters.
https://theconversation.com/poor-policy-and-short-sightedness-how-the-budget-treats-climate-change-and-energy-in-the-wake-of-disasters-180179
/[ appropriate propaganda ]/
*Climate Optimism*
We have reason for hope on climate change.
German Lopez - - April 3, 2022
Among the headline-grabbing wildfires, droughts and floods, it is easy
to feel disheartened about climate change.
I felt this myself when a United Nations panel released the latest major
report on global warming. It said that humanity was running out of time
to avert some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Another report
is coming tomorrow. So I called experts to find out whether my sense of
doom was warranted.
To my relief, they pushed back against the notion of despair. The world,
they argued, has made real progress on climate change and still has time
to act. They said that any declaration of inevitable doom would be a
barrier to action, alongside the denialism that Republican lawmakers
have historically used to stall climate legislation. Such pushback is
part of a budding movement: Activists who challenge climate dread
recently took off on TikTok, my colleague Cara Buckley reported.
“Fear is useful to wake us up and make us pay attention,” Katharine
Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told me. “But if
we don’t know what to do, it paralyzes us.”...
- -
*Channeling despair*
Experts and advocates want to capture legitimate concerns and funnel
them into action. The world’s governments and biggest businesses have
set goals to reduce greenhouse emissions in the coming decades, but they
will need the public’s help and support.
One model for this is road safety. Drivers can reduce their chances of
crashes by driving carefully, but even the safest can be hit. The U.S.
reduced car-crash deaths over several decades by passing sweeping laws
and rules that required seatbelts, airbags and collapsible steering
wheels; punished drunken driving; built safer roads and more — a
collective approach.
The same type of path can work for climate change, experts said. Cutting
individual carbon footprints is less important than systemic changes
that governments and companies enact to help people live more
sustainably. While individual action helps, it is no match for the
impact of entire civilizations that have built their economies around
burning carbon sources for energy...
The need for a sweeping solution can make the problem feel too big and
individuals too small, again feeding into despair.
But experts said that individuals could still make a difference, by
playing into a collective approach. You can convince friends and family
to take the issue seriously, changing what politicians and policies they
support. You can become involved in politics (including at the local
level, where many climate policies are carried out). You can actively
post about global warming on social media. You can donate money to
climate causes.
The bottom line, experts repeatedly told me: Don’t give up on the
future. Look for productive ways to prevent impending doom.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/briefing/climate-optimism-ukraine-week-ahead.html
/[ try local first ]/
*Many N.H. communities are turning to local solutions in the global
fight against climate change*
April 04, 2022
Mara Hoplamazian, New Hampshire Public Radio
Jessica Dunbar has cared about the environment for as long as she can
remember. She went to school for environmental science. She recycles.
She even worked for the New Hampshire Department of Environmental
Services for a while.
But she didn’t dwell on climate change, or the threat it posed to her
life and her community, until she had kids. Then, she said, it was like
her life had been extended by a hundred years.
“I don't know why, but it just hit me all of a sudden,” she said. “I had
this all too clear vision in my mind of how fragile the world was.”
As Dunbar started paying more attention to climate news, she found
herself feeling scared for the future and for her children. So she
started looking into what she could do to make a difference, like
getting a heat pump or a more fuel efficient car.
“I was in a panic. And what got me through that panicked moment was,
'OK, what can I do to try to make a difference?' Because I have to at
least try.”
- -
New Hampshire has passed legislation in the last few years to give
communities more options for energy transitions at the municipal level.
But Melissa Elander, who works with communities in the North Country to
implement energy projects through Clean Energy New Hampshire, said the
state has provided little support for energy committees.
“I would have to say that most of what I see happening at the municipal
level is happening largely without state support,” she said. “It’s a
very, very small percentage of funds that can come from the state.”
When asked about the critiques that the state has not done enough to
take action on these issues, New Hampshire Department of Energy
spokesperson Rorie Patterson said the agency “recognizes the risk posed
by climate change and that actions are required to mitigate those
risks.” Patterson also pointed to the department’s efforts to implement
clean energy programs authorized by lawmakers and Gov. Chris Sununu.
While Patterson did not directly address a question from NHPR about how
the state views the role of local communities in its energy strategy,
she noted that the agency oversees rebate and grant programs that have
supported energy projects at the municipal level.
*Reframing climate conversations*
In some communities, those leading the way on local energy committees
have struggled to convince their neighbors to take an interest in
climate solutions — or talk about climate change at all.
In Bethlehem, Van Houten said many people get interested in energy
issues when the price of fuel oil is high, but it can be hard to keep
attention sustained for the long haul.
After realizing that some in his community were turned off by talk of
climate change, he started to reframe the conversation. Instead of
focusing on how projects like energy efficiency retrofits at the town
hall could slow down global warming, he’s tried to emphasize how they
save taxpayers money.
“The whole Yankee independence and ingenuity and frugality thing rings
pretty strong up here,” he said.
These days, Van Houten is working on bringing more solar to Bethlehem:
on the roof of the library, atop the highway garage and behind the
town’s elementary school. But he said it’s been a long road, trying to
find funding and rally community support while also parsing through the
complicated energy policies that might influence these projects. He does
this work as a volunteer, on top of all the other obligations that make
up his life.
“I quit every year. I just don't tell anybody, and I show up at the next
meeting,” Van Houten said, wryly. “Sometimes I quit twice a year.”
But he knows his work is important — and that it could help spur action
elsewhere. Van Houten is part of a regional effort to encourage the
development of sustainable energy practices with a few other towns in
the region. The Ammonoosuc Regional Energy Team, founded in 2008 by
local energy committee members in the area, takes lots of different
approaches to encourage energy efficiency across the North Country, from
organizing educational fairs to advocating for a solar array at the
Profile High School in Bethlehem.
Jim Fitzpatrick, the chair of Franconia’s energy commission and a
co-lead on that regional energy team, has seen firsthand how local
energy projects like the ones Van Houten is championing in Bethlehem can
inspire voters in other communities.
When Fitzpatrick and others on Franconia's local energy committee
pitched a new solar array on this year’s town warrant, they expected
some debate. They gathered information for a detailed discussion about
how the town could pay for it and how it might benefit the community,
preparing to defend the plan to their fellow voters.
But when the issue came up at town meeting, the community didn’t need
much convincing. Fitzpatrick thinks the visibility of similar energy
projects in the area helped to win voters over.
“Bethlehem’s doing it, Sugar Hill’s doing it,” he said. “Why ain’t
Franconia doing it?”...
- -
To Fitzpatrick, it feels like a small drop in a big bucket.
“I love the fact that we’re doing this in town,” he said. “It ain’t
gonna make any difference, in the big picture.”
But the work that local energy volunteers are propelling in towns like
Franconia and Bethlehem is making some difference.
According to data from Clean Energy New Hampshire, projects in Coos and
northern Grafton Counties alone are saving more than a million kilowatt
hours every year. That’s about enough to power about 125 New England
homes — power that electricity generation plants no longer have to provide.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/04/04/nh-communities-local-solutions-climate-change
/[ Tired of facts? Try fiction ]/
*Opinion: Facts Haven’t Spurred Us to Climate Action. Can Fiction?*
The emerging genre of climate fiction is portraying — in ways that
nonfiction can’t — the perils of a scorching planet.
BY MARK JOHNSON 03.31.2022
CLIMATE SCIENTISTS MUST BE wondering what it will take to scare us
straight. Watching flood waters submerge 80 percent of New Orleans
during Hurricane Katrina didn’t do it. Nor did videos shot by
Australians in 2019 as they fled walls of flame, a hellish orange haze
in all directions. Will the deaths of more than 6 million people in the
Covid-19 pandemic — a tragedy that has highlighted the links between
climate change and infectious disease — jolt the world into action? I
wouldn’t count on it.
The central problem is that climate change lacks a human face — a vision
of the people who will inhabit the world to come, and what they will
endure. When we look into the faces of our children and grandchildren,
we’re unable to form a mental picture of them struggling to survive in
the world we’ve bequeathed to them.
Reexamining the Social Cost of Carbon
Sure, news reports and scientific texts about climate change have
presented a clear-eyed view of what we’ve done to the planet over the
last century and where that’s left us. The most recent United Nations
report, for instance, painted an alarming portrait of Earth in the grips
of climate change. But even those warnings may not capture the full
extent of the brewing catastrophe: According to a Washington Post
investigation published in November of last year, numerous countries
continue to underreport their greenhouse gas emissions. In any case, the
more recent warnings quickly faded from the news cycle, replaced by
coverage of the crisis in Ukraine. While the war in Ukraine is a unique
event, the loss of focus on our climate crisis is anything but.
*So when will we be frightened into action?*
I suspect that won’t happen until we are shown what it will look and
feel like to live on a scorching, ocean-logged, and atmospherically
violent planet. In other words, I suspect we’ll need the climate change
equivalent of “The Day After.”
Watched by more than 100 million television viewers on November 20,
1983, “The Day After” was a fictional but chillingly realistic movie
depiction of nuclear Armageddon. I remember watching it in a student
center at University of Toronto; it was probably the quietest event I
can remember from my five years on campus. Despite its flaws — the movie
downplayed the effects of a real nuclear war, for instance — the film
left us shaken. People talked about it for months. Then-President Ronald
Reagan watched the movie and wrote in his diary that it “left me greatly
depressed.” The film was followed in 1984 by the British film “Threads,”
yet another graphic depiction of the end that would await us if we
followed the path to nuclear war.
In the years that followed, momentum built for what would eventually
become The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was signed in 1991.
It’s impossible to say whether fictional depictions of nuclear war
played any role in bringing the U.S. and Soviet Union to the bargaining
table. But they forced humanity to view the flesh-and-blood consequences
that accompanied our pursuit of world-ending weaponry (a lesson we need
to remember given the alarming war in Ukraine).
What “The Day After” and “Threads” achieved through cinema, Nevil
Shute’s 1957 novel “On The Beach” accomplished with the written word.
Shute’s book imagines a group of ordinary Australians living out their
final months, marked for death by a slow-moving radioactive cloud. The
story’s power comes from its heartbreaking depiction of real people ―
men and women, babies and seniors ― all forced to measure existence in
weeks instead of years. Their lives would last only as long as it took
the winds to carry the deadly cloud to their shores.
When we look into the faces of our children and grandchildren, we’re
unable to form a mental picture of them struggling to survive in the
world we’ve bequeathed to them.
I read “On The Beach” as a teenager growing up in Brookline,
Massachusetts, during the Cold War, a period that must seem strange to
students today. In hindsight, the duck-and-cover-drills and the public
service messages on our black and white television screens — explaining
what to do when a nuclear bomb is headed your way — seem laughably
inadequate. My town even printed a pamphlet depicting what would happen
if a bomb exploded over the commercial center just a few blocks from my
home. Somehow, though, the haunting narrative of “On the Beach”
succeeded where these other efforts failed. Fiction transported us to an
imagined place that was paradoxically more real and relatable than the
nonfiction world that our government tried to show us.
The same might be true of climate change. An emerging genre known as
climate fiction, or “Cli Fi,” has attempted to drag us where nonfiction
cannot go. Starting with J.G. Ballard’s “The Drowned World” in 1962,
which imagined a flooded, almost uninhabitable planet, novelists began
to carve out visions of a future in which climate disaster has already
taken place. Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” published in
1993, looked ahead to the year 2024, now uncomfortably close at hand,
and put readers into the mind of a teenage girl living in the remnants
of a California gated community at a time of water shortages, crime, and
destitution.
This January, I entered the Cli Fi genre myself, with the publication of
my novel “Though The Earth Gives Way,” a retelling of one of the oldest
novels, Boccaccio’s “The Decameron.” In Boccaccio’s book, noblemen and
noblewomen who fled Florence during the Black Death hole up in a villa
outside the city and pass the time by telling stories. I wondered what
would happen if the men and women were instead refugees of climate
disasters who’d fled the coasts and found their way by chance to an old
retreat center in Michigan. Like Boccaccio’s characters mine, too, fall
back on one of the oldest resources we have, one of the few destined to
survive as long as we do: storytelling.
To be sure, nonfiction will continue to play an important role in
helping us understand what’s at stake with climate change. In its 2021
feature “Postcards From a World on Fire,” for instance, The New York
Times gave readers a climate tour of 193 countries: a sobering
kaleidoscope of hurricanes, sandstorms, droughts, floods, and heatwaves
that have turned our hottest cities into furnaces. With fiction,
however, we can also stretch our minds to imagine postcards from the
world that our children and grandchildren will inhabit if we don’t take
immediate action on climate change. I think you’ll agree: It is not a
place we want to go.
Mark S. Johnson is the author of the novel “Though The Earth Gives Way”
and covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
https://undark.org/2022/03/31/opinion-facts-havent-spurred-us-to-climate-action-can-fiction/
/[The news archive - looking back]/
*April 5, 2002*
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman denounces White House press
secretary Ari Fleischer's "...use of a press conference on the crisis in
the Middle East to shill, once again, for the Bush energy plan," observing:
"Even if the United States weren't dependent on imported oil, the
Middle East would still be a strategically crucial region, and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict would still be a world nightmare.
"But to the extent that oil independence would help -- and it would,
a bit, by reducing the leverage of Persian Gulf producers -- the
Bush administration has long since forfeited the moral high ground.
It has done so by vigorously opposing any serious efforts at
conservation, which would have to be the centerpiece of any real
plan to reduce oil imports.
"There are many ways to make this case; here are two more. Even at
its peak, a decade or so after drilling began, oil production from
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce imports by no more
than would a 3-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency --
something easily achievable, were it not for opposition from special
interest groups. Indeed, the Kerry-McCain fuel efficiency standards,
which the administration opposed, would have saved three times as
much oil as ANWR might produce. Or put it this way: Total world oil
production is about 75 million barrels per day, of which the United
States consumes almost 20; ANWR would produce, at maximum, a bit
more than 1 million.
"Yet a few months ago, Republican activists ran ads with
side-by-side photos of Tom Daschle and Saddam Hussein, declaring
that both men oppose drilling in ANWR -- and Dick Cheney, when
asked, stood behind those ads. Administration critics could, with
rather more justification, run ads with side-by-side photos of
George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, declaring that both men oppose
increased fuel efficiency standards. (Actually, I'm not aware that
Iraq's ruler has expressed an opinion on either issue.) Of course,
if such ads did run, there would be enormous outrage. After all,
turnabout wouldn't be fair play because, well, just because."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/05/opinion/at-long-last.html
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