[✔️] February 4, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Police kill 2 Climate Activist, s,

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 4, 2023*/

/[ police killed 2 climate activists - reports 350.org  ] /
*Climate Justice Must Address State & Police Violence*
CW: Police violence
This year we have already been faced with the dark realities of police 
and state violence against people of color.

In Tennessee, Tyre Nichols was on his way home from taking pictures of 
the sunset and admiring the beauty of our earth when police officers 
pulled him over, brutalized, and killed him.

In Georgia, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, also known as Tortuguita (Little 
Turtle), was shot and killed by police for protesting and resisting the 
building of “Cop City” – a city plan to build a police and military 
training site in Weelaunee Forest.

Both Nichols and Teran deserved to live and to be treated with dignity 
and respect. We’re left with complete rage and horror that their lives 
were brutally and unnecessarily ended by a violent policing institution 
that is rooted in white supremacy and prioritizes power and abuse over 
the needs of our people.

This state-sponsored violence and over-policing disproportionately 
impacts Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people – and it mirrors 
state-sponsored police violence towards environmental defenders 
worldwide, especially in the Global South.

Decades of environmental justice activism have shown that these same 
communities also bear the burden of the climate crisis. While a select 
few corporations and billionaires in the Global North profit, our 
communities shoulder the harmful effects of fossil fuel extraction, 
pollution, and their related health impacts.

As an organization and as a movement: we cannot say we are for climate 
justice, without also rising up against state-sponsored violence.

Our work to achieve climate justice and end the era of fossil fuels must 
be intersectional and focused on liberation.

There is no way to tackle the scale of the climate crisis without 
addressing the systemic racism that fuels it or the violent institutions 
willingly destroying our environment for training grounds to further 
more unchecked abuses of power and violence.
https://350.org/climate-justice-intersectional-and-focused-on-liberation



/[ this also works for anyone facing a predictable hardship - perhaps 
tell FEMA ]/
*Climate disasters hit poor people hardest. There’s an obvious solution 
to that.*
New experiments show the power of giving cash right before extreme 
weather strikes.
By Sigal Samuel
Feb 3, 2023
- -
*How just-in-time climate cash transfers work*
Humanitarian relief organizations are used to doing two things: helping 
people out after disaster has already struck, and helping them out by 
giving them stuff. A hurricane strikes, and in comes the Red Cross or 
the United Way with water and tarps for victims.

Just-in-time climate cash transfers turn that model on its head.

First, they offer people support before the shock hits, making them more 
resilient and limiting the economic and human damage when it comes. 
Second, they give straight-up cash. Not food. Not Super Bowl merchandise 
from the team that didn’t win the Super Bowl. Money.

We know from research on poverty alleviation that cash is preferable 
because it gives people the agency to buy the things they really need, 
as opposed to what outsiders think they need. And it can be disseminated 
much faster than goods, thanks to cellphone-based banking. Cash is now 
considered the baseline standard for challenges like poverty 
alleviation, with other interventions judged on whether they’re superior 
to cash.

And in the past few years, evidence is mounting that cash works very 
well for climate adaptation, too. Let’s look at three examples.

In July 2020, data-driven forecasts of river levels in Bangladesh showed 
that many households were about to experience severe flooding. The World 
Food Programme sent 23,434 households around $53 each a few days prior 
to and during the floods.

The preemptive action turned out to be a great bet. Those floods ended 
up being some of the worst and longest in decades: Over a million 
households were inundated, and food markets and health services were 
disrupted.

Compared to households that didn’t get a cash transfer, households that 
did were 36 percent less likely to go a day without eating, 12 percent 
more likely to evacuate household members, and 17 percent more likely to 
evacuate their livestock.

And the impacts were surprisingly durable. As the study authors write, 
“Three months after the flood, households that had received the transfer 
reported significantly higher child and adult food consumption and 
wellbeing. They also experienced lower asset loss, engaged in less 
costly borrowing after the flood, and reported higher earning potential.”...
- -
Soon after, the World Food Programme also tried anticipatory cash 
transfers in Somalia and Ethiopia, with similarly positive results: The 
cash infusions protected communities’ food security and livelihoods from 
the worst impacts of a forecasted drought.

In 2021, the government of Niger kicked off its own anticipatory cash 
transfer program for responding to water scarcity. The pilot program 
detects droughts early by using the satellite-based Water Requirement 
Satisfaction Index. When the index shows that water has fallen 10 
percent below its median at the end of the agricultural season, it 
automatically triggers the unconditional cash transfers to be sent out.

The trigger was activated for the first time in November 2021, and since 
March 2022, emergency transfers have been sent to 15,400 
drought-affected households. These transfers have allowed farmers to get 
help three to five months earlier than they would if they were just 
relying on traditional humanitarian aid. And receiving the support 
earlier meant they were less likely to have to resort to coping 
responses with costly social effects like reducing food consumption or 
pulling kids out of school.

The nonprofit GiveDirectly, a big believer in unconditional cash 
transfers, launched a climate adaptation program last year in Malawi. 
The extremely low-income country — where nearly three-quarters of the 
population lives on less than $1.90 a day — has already been hit with 
climate-related storms, with more expected to come.

Knowing how climate-vulnerable Malawi is, GiveDirectly gave 5,000 
farmers in the Balaka region two payments of $400, one in April and one 
in October, to coincide with key moments in their agricultural schedule. 
October is also the beginning of the wet season, when 95 percent of 
precipitation falls, meaning it’s when cyclones and extreme weather are 
most likely to occur.

Simultaneously, a group called United Purpose gave the farmers trainings 
on climate-smart agriculture, irrigation practices, and soil 
conservation. GiveDirectly and United Purpose had coordinated on timing, 
but they didn’t inform the farmers of the connection because they didn’t 
want to make the farmers feel they were expected to spend the cash on 
building climate resilience. They wanted the cash to be truly unconditional.

The results so far are promising. More farmers are using better seeds 
(which are drought- and flood-resistant), more are intercropping (which 
improves fertility), and fewer are going hungry (specifically, there was 
about a 60 percent drop in the proportion of recipients who went a whole 
day without eating).

For Laker-Oketta, the research director at GiveDirectly, it’s clear that 
anticipatory cash transfers for climate adaptation are a good idea. “The 
cash we give is not sufficient to put up a seawall — that’s something 
governments have to do,” she said. “But the lowest-hanging fruit is 
actually giving people agency to make certain decisions they need to 
make now. The question is not, ‘Does cash work?’ but, ‘What is the right 
amount, frequency, and timing?’”

Now, GiveDirectly is planning to experiment with the timing. They want 
to see if getting cash to people mere days before a weather shock, as 
opposed to weeks before, improves resilience more. So they’re launching 
a pilot with the government of Mozambique to give out just-in-time 
transfers, sending people around $225 just three or four days before the 
next flood strikes.

In January, they began pre-enrolling individuals in vulnerable villages, 
which are selected by overlaying poverty maps, population data, and 
flood risk maps. That way, people will be able to get fast payments 
directly ahead of likely storms during the rainy season in March and 
April...
- -
*“The best adaptation is to be rich”*
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation, along with poverty 
alleviation, are all absolutely crucial if we want a safe and just 
world. They’re also expensive, with mitigation projects alone slated to 
cost trillions over the next decade. How should the world divide funding 
between them?

When it comes to climate financing, the United Nations has called for a 
50/50 split on mitigation and adaptation. But what we see so far is 
still more like 90/10 in mitigation’s favor — a sore point at last 
year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. And instead of giving poorer 
nations additional money for adaptation, some rich nations have diverted 
development aid — which is already insufficient — to fund more 
mitigation projects...
- -
In other words, climate adaptation and reducing poverty go hand in hand.

That’s part of why Laker-Oketta, the GiveDirectly research director, 
said her organization didn’t worry about whether recipients would spend 
their unconditional cash on building climate resilience or on something 
else. “If someone makes the decision to spend the money on something 
else, it means that was their priority at that time,” she told me.

For Laker-Oketta personally, climate resilience was very much the 
priority the day we spoke. It’s currently supposed to be the dry season 
in Uganda, where she lives, and yet it was raining. Just hours before 
our call, her office flooded.

“I believe a lot of people who want most of the funding to be focused on 
mitigation are people who are not being directly affected by climate 
change right now,” she said. “Their only worry is, ‘If the climate gets 
worse, then I’ll be affected as well, so can we put as much as is 
necessary into preventing me from being part of those people who are 
affected?’ But if you’re living in a place where it’s flooding right 
now, then you’re going to think differently. Right now, what I need is a 
way to stop the rain from coming in!”

/Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect and co-host 
of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of 
consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and 
neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications./
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23574798/climate-adaptation-anticipatory-cash-transfers-givedirectly


/[ speak of the seas, the rising seas ]/
*Lost for words: fears of ‘catastrophic’ language loss due to rising seas*
Climate crisis could be ‘final nail in the coffin’ for half of all 
surviving languages, say linguists, as coastal communities are forced to 
migrate
Karen McVeigh
16 Jan 2023
Every 40 days a language dies. This “catastrophic” loss is being 
amplified by the climate crisis, according to linguists. If nothing is 
done, conservative estimates suggest that half of all the 7,000 
languages currently spoken will be extinct by the end of the century.

Speakers of minority languages have experienced a long history of 
persecution, with the result that by the 1920s half of all Indigenous 
languages in Australia, the US, South Africa and Argentina were extinct. 
The climate crisis is now considered the “final nail in the coffin” for 
many Indigenous languages and with them, the knowledge they represent.

“Languages are already vulnerable and endangered,” says Anastasia Riehl, 
the director of the Strathy language unit at Queen’s University in 
Kingston, Ontario. Huge factors are globalisation and migration, as 
communities move to regions where their language is not spoken or 
valued, according to Riehl.

“It seems particularly cruel,” she says, that most of the world’s 
languages are in parts of the world that are growing inhospitable to people.

Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation measuring 12,189 sq km (4,706 sq 
miles), has 110 languages, one for each 111 sq km, the highest density 
of languages on the planet. It is also one of the countries most at risk 
of sea level rise, she says.

People sit beneath a banyan tree, a centrepiece of village life in 
Ifira, Vanuatu.
Vanuatu, in the South Pacific Ocean, is rich with languages, but its 
communities face the prospect of upheaval caused by climate crisis. 
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
“Many small linguistic communities are on islands and coastlines 
vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise.” Others live on lands where 
rising temperature threaten traditional farming and fishing practices, 
prompting migration.


“When climate change comes in, it disrupts communities even more,” says 
Riehl. “It has a multiplier effect, the final nail in the coffin.”

If sea level rise or another climate impact hits, communities scatter to 
places where their language is not valued
Anouschka Foltz
Although the effects of global heating on language have not been well 
studied, it has caused increased instances of heatwaves, droughts, 
floods and sea level rise, which have already exposed millions of people 
to food insecurity, water shortages and driven them from their homes. 
Disasters, the majority of them weather related, accounted for 23.7m 
internal displacements in 2021, up from 18.8m in 2018. Over the past 10 
years, Asia and the Pacific were the regions most affected by 
displacement worldwide, with the Pacific island states the worst by 
population size.

Yet, it is precisely here where many Indigenous languages have thrived. 
One in five of the world’s languages are from the Pacific, according to 
the New Zealand Māori language commission.

“The Pacific, including the Philippines, India and Indonesia, has a lot 
of linguistic diversity. Some languages only have a few hundred 
speakers,” says Anouschka Foltz, an associate professor in English 
Linguistics at the University of Graz, in Austria.

“If sea level rise or another climate impact hits, they have to leave. 
Communities scatter to places where their language is not valued.”

Felix Mauricio, a member of the Uru Murato Indigenous community, puts a 
miniature replica of a boat known as a “totora boat” on a desert at the 
site of former Lake Poopo, near the village of Punaca Tinta Maria, 
province of Oruro, Bolivia.
Culture and traditional crafts and skills are also lost when an 
Indigenous language becomes extinct. Photograph: Aizar Raldes/AFP/Getty 
Images
A map of the world’s 577 critically endangered languages reveals 
clusters around equatorial Africa and in the Pacific and the Indian 
ocean region.

In response to the crisis, the UN launched the International Decade of 
Indigenous Languages in December. Preserving languages of Indigenous 
communities is “not only important for them, but for all humanity,” the 
UN general assembly president, Csaba Kőrösi, said, urging countries to 
allow access to education in Indigenous languages.

“With each Indigenous language that goes extinct, so too goes the 
thought, the culture, tradition and knowledge it bears,” said Kőrösi, 
echoing the sentiments of Ken Hale, the late US linguist and activist, 
who compared losing any language to “dropping a bomb on the Louvre”.

Dr Gregory Anderson is director of the Living Tongues Institute for 
Endangered Languages, a non profit based in the US that documents and 
records endangered languages.

“We are heading for a catastrophic language and cultural loss into the 
next century,” he says.

Anderson notes that the death of a language, when the last fluent 
speaker dies, is often the result of “some sort of assault” on 
Indigenous communities. It can be overt, such as when Indigenous 
children were forced into boarding schools and banned from speaking 
their native language in countries including the US, Canada, Australia 
and Scandinavian nations in the 1900s, or covert, where people with a 
strong accent are excluded from jobs.

Studies show that, while the suppression of Indigenous language is 
associated with mental health problems, the reverse can also be true. 
One study in Bangladesh showed that Indigenous youth capable of speaking 
their native language were less likely to consume alcohol or illicit 
substances in risky amounts, and were less exposed to violence.

Some efforts to save Indigenous languages have been successful, with the 
introduction of ‘immersion schools’ for young children being 
particularly effective. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP

There are some bright spots, too: such as New Zealand and Hawaii, where 
Indigenous languages have been resurrected.

In the 1970s, only 2,000 native speakers of Hawaiian remained, most in 
their seventh decade of life, but advocates launched “immersion 
schools”, where children are taught in Hawaiian. Today, more than 18,700 
people speak it. In New Zealand, only 5% of young Māori people spoke the 
language in the 1970s, but due largely to efforts by the Māori, backed 
by the government, more than 25% now speak it...
- -
Prof Rawinia Higgins, a member of the Global Taskforce for the 
International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032 and the New 
Zealand Māori language commissioner says: “Indigenous languages are an 
anchor to the past, as well as a compass to the future. Thirty-five 
years ago, people fought to save the Māori language with the government 
of the day boldly making it an official language protected by law. Once 
banned and seen by many as worthless, now more than eight in 10 of us 
see it as part of our identity as New Zealanders.”

The New Zealand broadcaster, journalist and Māori interpreter Oriini 
Kaipara was taught the language by her grandparents, in kōhanga reo, or 
“language nests” where only Māori is spoken...
- -
“My generation were fortunate enough to be raised in total immersion,” 
says Kaipara, who, as a primetime newsreader with a Māori chin marking, 
or moko kauae, has become an ambassador for Māori. “But language loss is 
still a huge threat to us. Those generations who were native speakers, 
held the customs, the understanding, the indigenous knowledge that was 
handed down by their parents. And that has gone.”

Māori have a “unique way” of connecting with their environment that is 
only accessible through their language, she says. The word matemateāone 
is almost untranslatable into English, she said, but expresses “a deep, 
emotional, spiritual, physical” longing for the Earth. “In essence, it 
means I belong,” she says. “My language is a gateway to my world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/16/linguists-language-culture-loss-end-of-century-sea-levels-rise


/
/

/[Mongabay Series: Covering Climate Now, Oceans]/
*An El Niño is forecast for 2023. How much coral will bleach this time?*
by Elizabeth Claire Alberts
2 February 2023

    -- Forecasts suggest that an El Niño climate pattern could begin
    later this year, raising sea temperatures at a time when global
    temperatures are already higher than ever due to human-driven
    climate change.

    -- If an El Niño develops and it becomes a moderate to severe event,
    it could raise global temperatures by more than 1.5°C (2.7°F) above
    pre-industrial levels, the threshold set by the Paris Agreement.

    -- An El Niño would generate many impacts on both terrestrial and
    marine ecosystems, including the potential for droughts, fires,
    increased precipitation, coral bleaching, invasions of predatory
    marine species like crown-of-thorns starfish, disruptions to marine
    food chains, and kelp forest die-offs.

- -
“When the next El Niño comes, whether it be in August or January or 
whatever … there’s no doubt about it, the corals will bleach and it will 
probably be the largest [event], even more widespread than the last 
ones,” Houk said. “But I think we’re starting to learn more and more 
about factors that offer resistance and recovery to this.”
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/02/an-el-nino-is-forecast-for-2023-how-much-coral-will-bleach-this-time/



/[The news archive - looking back at early mis, dis, and regular 
information battles ]/
/*February 4, 1992*/
February 4, 1992: In one of the worst examples of mainstream media 
false-balance in US history, Ted Koppel hosts a “debate” on ABC's 
"Nightline" between Sen. Al Gore (D-TN) and Rush Limbaugh on global 
warming and other environmental issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9rZKJt4ZC4 (Part 1)

http://youtu.be/WbC-yWycHfM (Part 2)


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