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<font size="+1"><i>July 10, 2017</i></font><br>
<b><br>
</b><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-wildfires-20170709-story.html">Raging
wildfires across California force nearly 8000 to evacuate: 'It
was terrifying'</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-wildfires-20170709-story.html">http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-wildfires-20170709-story.html</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40534648">A state
of emergency has been declared by the Canadian province of
British Columbia (BC) as it battles over 180 wildfires.</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40534648">http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40534648</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/towns-homes-evacuated-in-b-c-as-wildfires-burn-out-of-control-1.4196041">Towns,
homes evacuated in B.C. as wildfires burn out of control</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/towns-homes-evacuated-in-b-c-as-wildfires-burn-out-of-control-1.4196041">http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/towns-homes-evacuated-in-b-c-as-wildfires-burn-out-of-control-1.4196041</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/09/536316047/large-wildfires-force-evacuations-in-central-california">Large
Wildfires Force Evacuations In California; 5000 Firefighters
Deployed</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/09/536316047/large-wildfires-force-evacuations-in-central-california">http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/09/536316047/large-wildfires-force-evacuations-in-central-california</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/09/wildfires-burn-across-western-colorado/">Wildfires
burn across more than 15680 acres in western Colorado</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/09/wildfires-burn-across-western-colorado/">http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/09/wildfires-burn-across-western-colorado/</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-wildfire-idUSKBN19V005">Western
Canada wildfires may spread with more hot, dry weather</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-wildfire-idUSKBN19V005">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-wildfire-idUSKBN19V005</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.today.com/video/soaring-temperatures-fuel-wildfires-across-11-western-states-988987459812">Soaring
temperatures fuel wildfires across 11 western states</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.today.com/video/soaring-temperatures-fuel-wildfires-across-11-western-states-988987459812">http://www.today.com/video/soaring-temperatures-fuel-wildfires-across-11-western-states-988987459812</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://youtu.be/NlKKH74HBGE">(video)
Firefighters battle wildfires across the West</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/NlKKH74HBGE">https://youtu.be/NlKKH74HBGE</a><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/communities/belle_fourche/american-red-cross-offers-tips-to-prepare-for-wildfires/article_eec34ece-4f6c-5f69-a073-84c5a884df09.html">American
Red Cross offers tips to prepare for wildfires</a></b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/communities/belle_fourche/american-red-cross-offers-tips-to-prepare-for-wildfires/article_eec34ece-4f6c-5f69-a073-84c5a884df09.html">http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/communities/belle_fourche/american-red-cross-offers-tips-to-prepare-for-wildfires/article_eec34ece-4f6c-5f69-a073-84c5a884df09.html</a><br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html"><br>
When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?</a><b><br>
</b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html"><b>The
Uninhabitable Earth</b></a><br>
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change
could wreak - sooner than you think.<br>
By David Wallace-Wells<b><br>
</b><b>I. 'Doomsday'</b><br>
Peering beyond scientific reticence.<br>
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global
warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely
scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the
lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas - and the
cities they will drown - have so dominated the picture of global
warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that
they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer
at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the
coastline will not be enough.<br>
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans
conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to
uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as
the end of this century.<br>
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to
comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70
degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole,...<br>
.. And however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we
have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is
another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only
provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a
climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries,
perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wallace Smith Broecker,
the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term "global warming,"
means when he calls the planet an "angry beast." You could also go
with "war machine." Each day we arm it more.<br>
<b>II. Heat Death</b><br>
The bahraining of New York.<br>
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having
to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the
temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of
refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep
pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible
for large portions of the planet's equatorial band, and especially
the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of
Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent,
simply moving around outside when it's over 105 degrees Fahrenheit
would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a
human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.<br>
Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and
cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed
for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary
history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world's
population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat...<br>
The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a
term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat
registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it's swung
around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more
quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and
humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26
or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35
degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner....<br>
..The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still.
By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest
months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely
to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century.
Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon
problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates
aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all
the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And
indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and
Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures
as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from
now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million
Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.<br>
<b>III. The End of Food</b><br>
Praying for cornfields in the tundra.<br>
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple
cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree
of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high
as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five
degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50
percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them.
And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce
just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that
spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.<br>
Pollyannaish plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop
math applies only to those regions already at peak growing
temperature, and they are right - theoretically, a warmer climate
will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the
pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown,
the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those
places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing
temperature - which means even a small warming will push them down
the slope of declining productivity. And you can't easily move
croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like
remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there;
it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile
dirt.<br>
<b>IV. Climate Plagues</b><br>
What happens when the bubonic ice melts?<br>
Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as
long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time
into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even
less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also
frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There
are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in
the air for millions of years - in some cases, since before humans
were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would
have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge
from the ice.<br>
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In
Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918
flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100
million - about 5 percent of the world's population and almost six
times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic
served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May,
scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in
Siberian ice, too - an abridged history of devastating human
sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.<br>
...What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are
existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming.
...<br>
<b>V. Unbreathable Air</b><br>
A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.<br>
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we
breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed
400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from
current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that
concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive
ability declines by 21 percent.<br>
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases
in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The
warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century,
Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy
ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has
projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be
breathing air above the WHO "safe" level; one paper last month
showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother's exposure to
ozone raises the child's risk of autism (as much as tenfold,
combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you
think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood....<br>
<b>VI. Perpetual War</b><br>
The violence baked into heat.<br>
Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want
you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that
contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the
conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon
suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke
and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious
relationships between temperature and violence: For every
half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10
and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In
climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing:
A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many
wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double
this century.<br>
This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke
to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change:
The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble
enough, but being the world's policeman is quite a bit harder when
the crime rate doubles. ...<br>
<b>VII. Permanent Economic Collapse</b><br>
Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.<br>
The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed
between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great
Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and
everything.<br>
But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of
historians studying what they call "fossil capitalism" have begun to
suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which
began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of
innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply
our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power - a onetime
injection of new "value" into a system that had previously been
characterized by global subsistence living.... <br>
<b>VIII. Poisoned Oceans</b><br>
Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.<br>
That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical
reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level
rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the
world's major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power
plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas,
marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet
will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water
gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters
of sea level today.<br>
But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present,
more than a third of the world's carbon is sucked up by the oceans -
thank God, or else we'd have that much more warming already. But the
result is what's called "ocean acidification," which, on its own,
may add a half a degree to warming this century. It is also already
burning through the planet's water basins...<br>
<b>IX. The Great Filter</b><br>
Our present eeriness cannot last.<br>
So why can't we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great
Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global
warming and natural disaster haven't become major subjects of
contemporary fiction - why we don't seem able to imagine climate
catastrophe, and why we haven't yet had a spate of novels in the
genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names "the
environmental uncanny." "Consider, for example, the stories that
congeal around questions like, 'Where were you when the Berlin Wall
fell?' or 'Where were you on 9/11?' " he writes. "Will it ever be
possible to ask, in the same vein, 'Where were you at 400 ppm?' or
'Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?' " His answer:
Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are
simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves
about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the
journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma
of social fate....<br>
...But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the
atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past
three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85
percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation,
global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe,
and that the story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is
also the story of a single lifetime...<br>
<font size="-1" color="#000099"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html">http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html</a></font><br>
<b><br>
<br>
</b><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-environment-greenhouse-gases-donald-trump-633796">Can
We Stop Climate Change? Maybe, If We Take Steps Now to Stop
Emitting Greenhouse Gases</a></b><br>
<font size="-1">If we stop our emissions today, we won't go back to
the past. The Earth will warm. And since the response to warming
is more warming through feedbacks associated with melting ice and
increased atmospheric water vapor, our job becomes one of limiting
the warming. If greenhouse gas emissions are eliminated quickly
enough, within a small number of decades, it will keep the warming
manageable and the Paris Agreement goals could be met. It will
slow the change – and allow us to adapt. Rather than trying to
recover the past, we need to be thinking about best possible
futures.</font><font size="-1" color="#666666"><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-environment-greenhouse-gases-donald-trump-633796">http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-environment-greenhouse-gases-donald-trump-633796</a></font><br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882">If
we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop
climate change?</a></b><br>
Earth's climate is changing rapidly. We know this from billions of
observations, documented in thousands of journal papers and texts
and summarized every few years by the United Nations'
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The primary cause of that
change is the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and
natural gas.<br>
One of the goals of the international Paris Agreement on climate
change is to limit the increase of the global surface average air
temperature to 2 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial times.
There is a further commitment to strive to limit the increase to
1.5℃.<br>
Earth has already, essentially, reached the 1℃ threshold. Despite
the avoidance of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions
through use of renewable energy, increased efficiency and
conservation efforts, the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere remains high.<br>
International plans on how to deal with climate change are
painstakingly difficult to cobble together and take decades to work
out. Most climate scientists and negotiators were dismayed by
President Trump's announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the
Paris Agreement.<br>
<font size="-1" color="#666666"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882">https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1" color="#000099"><b><a
href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07">(51
mins audio) On The Media Apocalypse, Now</a></b></font><br>
Science fiction has always been an outlet for our greatest
anxieties. How the genre is exploring the reality of climate change.
<br>
Plus: new words to describe the indescribable. <br>
Science fiction has always been an outlet for our greatest
anxieties. This week, we delve into how the genre is exploring the
reality of climate change. . Plus: new words to describe the
indescribable. <br>
1. Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer, author of the Southern Reach
Trilogy and Borne, on writing about the relationships between people
and nature.<br>
While apocalyptic narratives have been part of popular culture for
centuries and are common subject matter for films and literature,
such stories now seem scarily realistic given the increasing impact
of climate change. Brooke speaks with...VanderMeer about the
responsibility of fiction to illuminate the threats of climate
change and human degradation of the planet, and how he imagines what
our existence will look like in the coming years. His latest novel
is Borne, and part of his Southern Reach Trilogy is being adapted as
a movie for release next year.<br>
2. Claire Vaye Watkins @clairevaye talks about Gold Fame Citrus, her
work of speculative fiction in which an enormous sand dune threatens
to engulf the southwest... extreme drought has left California baked
and barren - and a massive dune threatens the entire Southwest.
Watkins talks to Brooke about the world she imagines, and the pain
of being a climate change refugee. Storytelling, she says, might
help the public understand the real looming threats.<br>
3. Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his latest work, New York 2140.
The seas have risen 50 feet and lower Manhattan is submerged. And
yet, there's hope. (The science fiction writer... speaks with
Brooke about his new book New York 2140, in which Manhattan is
partially submerged by water and citizens travel using boats,
similar to Venice. He discusses the role of fiction as a blueprint
for hope, and why his New York City of the future still struggles
with capitalist impulses-the same ones he says are responsible for
climate change today. <br>
4. British writer Robert Macfarlane @RobGMacfarlane on new language
for our changing world... author of Landmarks and The Old Ways and a
fellow at Cambridge University, believes we need new words to
describe our changing Earth and the feelings ecological destruction
stirs within us all. He talks to Brooke about how new terms can help
us come to grips with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways humans are
altering the environment, and how naming something can be a way of
preserving it. <br>
Throughout the show: listeners offer their own new vocabulary for
the Anthropocene era. Many thanks to everyone who left us voice
memos!<br>
<font size="-1" color="#666666"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07">http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07</a></font><br>
-also:<br>
The Leonard Lopate Show<br>
<b><a
href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/scientist-rides-understand-misinformation">A
Scientist Bikes To Understand Misinformation</a></b><br>
Climate scientist David Goodrich on his book "A Hole In The Wind,"
about his cross-country bicycle trip to understand how
misinformation about science and the environment spreads. Jul 5,
2017<br>
Climate scientist David Goodrich joins us to discuss his book A Hole
in the Wind: A Climate Scientist's Bicycle Journey Across the United
States. Goodrich biked 4,200 miles from Maryland across the country
to Oregon to find out how misinformation about science and the
environment spreads. Along the way, he learned why climate change is
such a complicated issue for so many Americans.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/scientist-rides-understand-misinformation">http://www.wnyc.org/story/scientist-rides-understand-misinformation</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/07/these_maps_show_just_how_climate_change_will_screw_the_poor.html">Climate
Change Will Also Exacerbate Wealth Inequality</a></b><br>
New data make stunning predictions about how climate change will
affect specific regions of the United States.<br>
Climate change is a global problem with extremely local impacts. A
major new study illuminates how the effects of climate change will
reverberate economically across the United States. Its findings are
both a warning of challenges to come and an opportunity to
recalibrate how resources are allocated to protect Americans from
global warming's negative repercussions.<br>
Published in the journal Science, the study found that unmitigated
climate change will make the United States "poorer and more
unequal," with the poorest third of counties across the country
potentially sustaining economic damages costing as much as 20
percent of their income. Furthermore, if emissions are not slowed
and the planet warms 6-10 degrees Fahrenheit (3-5 degrees Celsius)
above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, costs will
approach those of the Great Recession-"except they will not go away
afterwards and damages for poor regions will be many times larger."<br>
<font size="-1" color="#666666"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/07/these_maps_show_just_how_climate_change_will_screw_the_poor.html">http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/07/these_maps_show_just_how_climate_change_will_screw_the_poor.html</a><br>
thanks to <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.climatedesk.org/">http://www.climatedesk.org/</a></font><br>
<b><br>
</b><b><br>
<b><a
href="https://ethicsandclimate.org/2017/07/07/the-moral-outrageousness-of-trumps-decision-on-the-paris-agreement/">Ethics
and Climate: The Moral Outrageousness of Trump's Decision on
the Paris Agreement</a></b></b><br>
Donald A. BrownScholar In Residence and Professor <br>
Widener University Commonwealth Law School <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:dabrown57@gmail.com">dabrown57@gmail.com</a><br>
When Pope Francis in May of 2015 issued his Laudata Si encyclical
which called climate change a moral issue, it got global attention.
Yet despite extensive international media coverage of worldwide
condemnation of President Trump's decision to remove the United
States from the Paris agreement, there has been relatively little
coverage of why the Trump decision should be understood not only as
a dangerous break with the international community but as a
profoundly immoral choice....<br>
Climate change has certain features that more than any other global
environmental problem call for responding to it as a moral problem.
First, it is a problem caused mostly by high-emitting developed
countries that are putting relatively low emitting developing
countries most at risk. Second, the potential harms to the most
vulnerable nations and people are not mere inconveniences but
include catastrophic threats to life and the ecological systems on
which life depends. Third, those people and nations most at risk can
do little to protect themselves by petitioning their governments to
shield them; their best hope is that high-emitting nations will
respond to their obligations to not harm others. Fourth CO2
emissions become well mixed in the atmosphere so that CO2 atmosphere
concentrations are roughly the same around the world regardless of
the source of the emissions. Therefore unlike other air pollution
problems which most threaten only those nations and communities
located within the pollution plume, greenhouse gas emissions from
any one country are threatening people and other countries around
the world. This means that US greenhouse gas emissions are causing
and threatening enormous harm all over the world....<br>
Yet it is the Trump assertion that the United States can base its
energy policy primarily on putting US economic interests first while
ignoring US obligations to not harm others that most clearly
provokes moral outrage around the world. The moral principle that
people may not harm others on the basis of self-interest is
recognized by the vast majority of the world's religions and in
international law under the "no harm principle". The "no- harm'
rule is a principle of customary international law whereby a nation
is duty-bound to prevent, reduce, and control the risk of
environmental harm to other nations caused by activities within the
nation For these reasons, the Trump decision on the Paris Agreement
is a moral travesty.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://ethicsandclimate.org/2017/07/07/the-moral-outrageousness-of-trumps-decision-on-the-paris-agreement">https://ethicsandclimate.org/2017/07/07/the-moral-outrageousness-of-trumps-decision-on-the-paris-agreement</a><b><br>
<br>
<br>
</b><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfires-spread-quickly-evacuation-orders-lifted-colorado-montana/">(video)
California fires spread quickly, evacuation orders lifted in
other parts of West</a></b><br>
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - A pair of California wildfires have quickly
spread, threatening hundreds of homes and forcing evacuations at a
popular lakeside campground and a summer camp where flames
temporarily trapped children and counselors, a fire official said. <br>
In other parts of the West, evacuation orders were lifted in
Colorado and Montana towns threatened by wildfires, while air and
ground crews battled a growing grass fire in northwestern Colorado.<br>
The fire that started early Saturday afternoon in California's Santa
Barbara County had spread to both sides of Highway 154 and was
"completely out of control," county fire Capt. Dave Zaniboni said.
About 90 children and 50 counselors were struck at the Circle V
Ranch and had to take shelter there until they could be safely
evacuated.<br>
The Santa Barbara County fire was one of three in California that
grew quickly as much of the state baked in heat that broke records.
A record that stood 131 years in Los Angeles was snapped when the
temperature spiked at 98 degrees downtown. The previous record of 95
degrees was set in 1886, the National Weather Service said. <br>
Excessive heat sent Southern Californians flocking to beaches and in
search of water, shade and air conditioning to escape the heat.
Forecasters warned that triple-digit temperatures up to 110 degrees
would be common in some inland areas and could be deadly for the
elderly, children and outdoor workers. Air quality reached unhealthy
and very unhealthy in areas inland from Los Angeles. <br>
Brutally hot temperatures have been recorded across the Southwest,
CBS News' Chris Martinez reported. Phoenix hit a high of 118 degrees
Friday, breaking a 112-year record. Palm Springs, California,
reached 122 degrees, one of its hottest days ever. And in Death
Valley, the mercury soared to 127.<br>
"We are going to see an increase in calls during this peak heat,"
said Los Angeles Fire Captain Erik Scott. <br>
Scott said many people ignore the very real risks of spending too
much time outdoors. And even for the most seasoned veterans,
"firefighters are not exempt to this heat themselves," Scott said.<br>
"Firefighters take with them to a fire 100 extra pounds - you have
temperatures up to 112 degrees right now, it's very challenging,"
Scott said.<br>
High temps and dry gusts tripled the size of another Santa Barbara
wildfire to nearly 30 square miles over eight hours and forced
evacuations of about 200 homes in a rural area east of Santa Maria,
fire spokesman Kirk Sturm said.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfires-spread-quickly-evacuation-orders-lifted-colorado-montana/">http://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-wildfires-spread-quickly-evacuation-orders-lifted-colorado-montana/</a></font><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/record-breaking-heat-fuels-wildfires/">http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/record-breaking-heat-fuels-wildfires/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-climate-change-fairness-argument-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-2017-07">Trump
and the Truth About Climate Change</a></b> <br>
Joseph E. Stiglitz Follow @JosephEStiglitz<br>
Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979<br>
BRUSSELS - Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United
States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue
state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement.
For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as
he put it in 2012, "The concept of global warming was created by and
for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive."
But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US
from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad
for the US and implicitly unfair to it. <br>
In fact, the major flaw in Trump's reasoning is that combating
climate change would strengthen the US, not weaken it. Trump is
looking toward the past – a past that, ironically, was not that
great. His promise to restore coal-mining jobs (which now number
51,000, less than 0.04% of the country's nonfarm employment)
overlooks the harsh conditions and health risks endemic in that
industry, not to mention the technological advances that would
continue to reduce employment in the industry even if coal
production were revived.<br>
In fact, far more jobs are being created in solar panel installation
than are being lost in coal. More generally, moving to a green
economy would increase US income today and economic growth in the
future. In this, as in so many things, Trump is hopelessly mired in
the past. <br>
America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object
of derision. In the aftermath of Trump's withdrawal of the US from
the Paris accord, a large sign was hung over Rome's city hall: "The
Planet First." Likewise, France's new president, Emmanuel Macron,
poked fun at Trump's campaign slogan, declaring "Make Our Planet
Great Again." <br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-climate-change-fairness-argument-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2017-07">https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-climate-change-fairness-argument-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2017-07</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/epa-staffers-weigh-in-on-trump-damage/">Dozens
of EPA Staffers Weigh In on the Damage Trump Has Inflicted</a></b><br>
Morale is seriously low.<br>
REBECCA LEBERJ<br>
Typically, when presidents or vice presidents visit EPA headquarters
to give a speech, they've used the opportunity to highlight the work
the EPA does, not to reprimand employees. Trump's visit to sign an
executive order in March was different. Few if any staffers were
invited to attend the speech where Trump, surrounded by coal miners,
declared the agency's supposed war on coal to be over. "Nobody was
invited to [Trump's visit to EPA HQ] which was as in your face,
insulting thing as I've experienced in my time here," one person
says in the report.<br>
In another excerpt, a staffer describes the surreal atmosphere
that's turning regulators into yes-men: "I mean every day, every
single day there's one more surreal thing, and everybody is afraid.
Everybody's afraid so no one pushes back, nobody says anything. They
kind of hem and haw [around Pruitt]."<br>
One EPA employee noted that he or she's seen more self-policing from
colleagues, while others noted a new level of resistance to the
agency's leadership. "I have worked under six Administrations with
political appointees leading EPA from both parties," one says. "This
is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the
environmental policies of an Administration and by extension
[Pruitt]."<br>
Over the course of its 47-year-history, EPA staff have faced off
with other hostile presidents and survived. But from how the
veterans tell it, Trump's assault is unlike anything they've seen
before.<br>
"I think there's a general consensus among the career people," one
person says, "that at bottom they're basically trying to destroy the
place."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/epa-staffers-weigh-in-on-trump-damage/">http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/epa-staffers-weigh-in-on-trump-damage/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pingos-expose-global-warming-threat-to-humanity/article64484.html">Pingos
Expose Global Warming Threat to Humanity</a></b><br>
Already, Russian scientists have identified 7,000 "alternative
pingos" in Siberia. According to The Washington Post, "Russian
Scientists Find 7,000 Siberian Hills Possibly Filled with Explosive
Gas," March 27, 2017, Vladimir E. Romanovsky, geophysicist at the
University of Alaska in Fairbanks claims: "This is really a new
thing to permafrost science. It has not been reported in the
literature before," Ibid. Romanovsky estimates there could be as
many as 100,000 "alternative pingos" (smaller than regular pingos)
across the entire Arctic permafrost.<br>
If we did not have anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming,
pingos would not suddenly be ubiquitous, and there would be no
reason to write this article. However, thousands of earthen hills
have been popping-up in the lower Arctic regions. The operative
question therefore is whether pingos, by releasing methane, will
accelerate global warming, leading to way too much heat, and runaway
global warming, resulting in burnout of agriculture. Then,
starvation sets in for millions, maybe billions. Thereafter, global
warfare reigns supreme. Life turns sour. No Hollywood film has ever
captured the essence of the shockingly appalling scenario that
unfolds, but the TV series The Walking Dead sure seems close. Do
films reflect future society?<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pingos-expose-global-warming-threat-to-humanity/article64484.html">http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pingos-expose-global-warming-threat-to-humanity/article64484.html</a><br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA"><br>
</a><font size="+1"><font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA">This Day in Climate
History July 10, 2007</a> - from D.R. Tucker</b></font><font
size="+1"><b><br>
</b>July 10, 2007: On MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann,"
Air America host Rachel Maddow points out the mainstream media's
fetish for false balance, specifically citing climate coverage.<br>
</font></font><font color="#666666"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA">http://youtu.be/vcMFwuu_UlA</a></font><font
size="+1"><font size="+1"><b><br>
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