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<font size="+1"><i>February 18, 2018</i></font><br>
<br>
[time lapse video]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.euronews.com/2018/02/16/watch-pine-island-glacier-readies-for-another-crack">Watch:
Pine Island glacier readies for another crack</a></b><br>
By Rafael Cereceda, Feb 16, 2018<br>
Dutch professor alerts of a new crack that could create a massive
iceberg at the Antarctic glacier, whose front has been retracting
since 2000...<br>
Researchers have alerted of a new rift at the Pine Island glacier
that is strikingly similar to the ones that led to massive splits
last year and in 2015...<br>
Professor Stef Lhermitte published a photo on Twitter based on
NASA's Landsat satellite imagery. It shows new cracks "very similar"
to those massive "calve events". <br>
The animation, obtained with ESA's Sentinel 1 satellite photos,
shows the evolution of the glacier's front from October 2014 until
the beginning of February 2018. <br>
The most disturbing is probably how quickly the icebergs melt after
the massive 2015 and 2017 cracks. <br>
Lhermitte told Euronews the glacier calving is part of the normal
life cycle of a floating glacier tongue. "Since 2000 there have been
five large calving events and the glacier front has gradually
retreated. The pattern of calving however has changed a bit though:
2015 and 2017 are different from previous events as the calving
results from internal rifts with calving fronts further inland."<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.euronews.com/2018/02/16/watch-pine-island-glacier-readies-for-another-crack">http://www.euronews.com/2018/02/16/watch-pine-island-glacier-readies-for-another-crack</a></font><br>
<br>
<b><br>
</b>[time running out]<b><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/02/17/washington-state-climate-lawsuit-inslee/">Newest
Youth Climate Lawsuit Targets Washington State</a></b><br>
By Karen Savage<br>
Thirteen young people are suing the state of Washington for
violating their constitutional rights by failing to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions and protect them from the impacts of
climate change.<br>
The plaintiffs say the state is preventing them from enjoying the
same rights, benefits and privileges of past generations and is
violating the state's public trust doctrine.<br>
In the lawsuit, filed Friday in King County Superior Court, the
plaintiffs allege that the state of Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee and
several state agencies have known for a long time that younger
generations are living in "dangerous climate conditions" but <b>have
acted with "shocking deliberate indifference and abdication of
duty</b>" by exacerbating the climate crisis and delaying
meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gases.<br>
Several of the plaintiffs in the suit were also plaintiffs in Foster
v. Ecology, which asked the court in 2014 to force the Washington
Department of Ecology to consider a petition to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions. The court acknowledged the youth had the
constitutional right to live in a healthful environment with the
benefit of public trust resources and ruled that the state was not
adequately reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.<br>
The case resulted in the adoption of Washington's Clean Air Rule in
2016, however plaintiffs say the rule took too long and did not go
far enough. It exempts the state's only coal-fired generating
station and other big polluters and the plaintiffs say it is not
aggressive enough to protect future generations from the dire
consequences of climate change.<br>
The rule's compliance requirements were also suspended in December
as the result of a ruling by the Thurston County Superior Court.<br>
"Defendants have a systemic policy, custom and practice of
authorizing projects, activities, and policies that cause emissions
of dangerous and substantial levels of GHG pollution into the
atmosphere," wrote Andrea Rogers, an attorney with Our Children's
Trust, who is representing the young plaintiffs in the new case.<br>
A spokesperson for Inslee's office said officials are still
reviewing the complaint.<br>
"It is worth noting that Gov. Inslee has spent a considerable part
of his life and career dedicated to fighting climate change,
fighting for renewable energy, clean air and clean water," she said,
adding that several bills currently before the state legislature
would strengthen these efforts.<br>
Representatives from the other defendant agencies did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.<br>
"This lawsuit that we're filing should open the Washington
government's eyes to the fact that they have to do more than tell
the public that we need to use cleaner energy. They need to stop
causing climate change and use clean energy," said 16-year-old
plaintiff India B., who recently had to evacuate her home due to
wildfires made worse by climate change.<br>
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction that would force Washington
to develop an enforceable and science-based state climate recovery
plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect the climate.
Plaintiffs are also asking the court to monitor the state's progress
toward meeting the plan's goals similar to court monitoring in the
landmark Brown v. Board of Education civil rights decision and the
Brown v. Plata prison overcrowding case.<br>
"This lawsuit gives the Washington state government a chance to take
the lead and commit to the citizens it serves and the lives it must
protect," said 17-year-old Aji Piper, who is also one of 21 young
plaintiffs who are suing the federal government in Juliana v. United
States.<br>
After filing the suit, Rogers sent a letter to Inslee on behalf of
the plaintiffs, expressing their willingness to work with him, but
stressing that time is of the essence.<br>
<b>"These youth have no more time to barter and plead with those
whose metric is political feasibility instead of constitutional
duty and scientific necessity," said Rogers in the letter.</b><br>
Climate change is already taking its toll on Washington State. Last
summer wildfires raged across the state, burning more than 300,000
acres, filling the air with a smoky haze and making breathing
difficult, particularly for those with asthma or other respiratory
conditions. Sea levels and temperatures are rising, leading to
acidification of Pugent Sound, threatening the state's shellfish
industry.<br>
"Climate change is impacting my ability to continue participating in
my family's traditions - things like salmon fishing, digging camas
roots and picking berries for food," said 13-year-old plaintiff
Kailani S., a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville
Reservation.<br>
"Our land is being destroyed by climate change. I'm simply calling
on the state of Washington to do its job to protect my future, my
culture's future, and generations to come," she said.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/02/17/washington-state-climate-lawsuit-inslee/">https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/02/17/washington-state-climate-lawsuit-inslee/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Video explanation]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://youtu.be/Pp5kK0Td-Vc">Ice
Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE</a></b><br>
Rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood coastal cities by
the end of this century. Based on an article written by Eric
Holthaus. Read the full story <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="Ice%20Apocalypse,Rapid%20collapse%20of%20Antarctic%20glaciers%20could%20flood%20coastal%20cities%20by%20the%20end%20of%20this%20century.">Ice
Apocalypse Rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood
coastal cities by the end of this century.</a><font size="-1"><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/Pp5kK0Td-Vc">https://youtu.be/Pp5kK0Td-Vc</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[NASA Ice studies]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating">New
Study Finds Sea Level Rise Accelerating</a></b><br>
Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades,
rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on
25 years of NASA and European satellite data.<br>
This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland
and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise
projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a
constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve
Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the
University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado's Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a
member of NASA's Sea Level Change team.<br>
If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea
level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 -- enough to
cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new
assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; CU Boulder; the University of South
Florida in Tampa; and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
The team, driven to understand and better predict Earth's response
to a warming world, published their work Feb. 12 in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<br>
"This is almost certainly a conservative estimate," Nerem said. "Our
extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the
future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we
are seeing in the ice sheets today, that's not likely."<br>
Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere
increase the temperature of air and water, which causes sea level to
rise in two ways. First, warmer water expands, and this "thermal
expansion" of the ocean has contributed about half of the 2.8 inches
(7 centimeters) of global mean sea level rise we've seen over the
last 25 years, Nerem said. Second, melting land ice flows into the
ocean, also increasing sea level across the globe.<font size="-1"><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating">https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Oil irony]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.courthousenews.com/irony-big-oils-global-warming-case-could-hinge-on-jurisdiction/">Big
Oil's Global Warming Case Could Hinge on Jurisdiction</a></b><br>
February 16, 2018 NICHOLAS IOVINO <br>
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The fate of five lawsuits seeking to hold the
world's biggest oil companies liable for global climate change
hinges on a murky jurisdictional question that could get some cases
booted out of federal court.<br>
For the past eight days, attorneys for more than a dozen oil
companies urged two federal judges not to send lawsuits against them
back to state court, where five California cities and counties sued
Big Oil last year...<br>
"The extraordinary nature of these claims encompasses conduct across
the globe," the oil companies' attorney Theodore Boutrous said in
court Thursday. "We think the federal courts need to hear this,
because it's uniquely federal."<br>
"The big part of your presentation is an assumption that the state
court system is not capable of fairly adjudicating a question of
federal preemption," Chhabria said...<br>
If the litigation does advance beyond issues of jurisdiction and
federal preemption, Kaswan said, the plaintiffs will face another
daunting challenge: proving that the oil companies' conduct caused
or substantially contributed to climate change and rising sea
levels...<br>
"I do think there will be a lot of interesting questions about
causation and proximate causation - if there's some link, and if
it's enough of a link in that context," Kaswan said. "Those will be
very difficult questions."<font size="-1"><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.courthousenews.com/irony-big-oils-global-warming-case-could-hinge-on-jurisdiction/">https://www.courthousenews.com/irony-big-oils-global-warming-case-could-hinge-on-jurisdiction/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[clips from essay]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://medium.com/@enjohnston/the-darkness-and-the-needle-4abec6ff8792">The
Darkness and the Needle</a></b><br>
Emily Johnston <br>
What I want to talk about today is darkness and
uncertainty - because we are at the start of a long period of
darkness and uncertainty, and if we cannot learn to inhabit them, to
be strong and steady in that dark fog, we will not survive...<br>
Most or all of you probably understand something about the dangers
of climate change. What you probably don't know, if you don't
inhabit the world that I do, is that we likely have only about two
and a half years to keep catastrophic climate change from being
irreversible. This is not the assessment of an outlier scientist
with a tin-foil hat; that was the word used, and the time frame
used, by Christina Figueres, the former UN climate chief, last June
(at that point, she said "three years"), based on the assessment of
many, many scientists. Others use slightly different timing (I've
also heard "two years", and that was last year), depending on what
benchmark they're using - 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees Celsius of
warming, etc. But all are agreed, we are in dire shape, and our
time-window for keeping this from being permanent is very, very
short...<br>
The next two years, give or take, are the most important years in
the history of humanity. We have the profound honor of being perhaps
the only people in history to know exactly what threatens the world
most, while still being in a position to avert much of it...<br>
When those two and a half years are over, we cannot say, "we did
what we could" and walk away. In our lifetimes, there will be no
walking away, because we know that the range of possibility is
enormous: at one end, we might lose five or ten percent of species,
and tens of millions of human lives, at the other end the Earth
might lose 95% of its species, as it did the last time greenhouse
gases overwhelmed it. In that case, humans will surely be among
them. We know for a fact that this is a real risk.<br>
Those of us to whom questioning and mystery and empathy come more
naturally can bring those qualities to the groups that we're part
of, and maybe help balance them thereby. Internal direction tends to
be how we find our way. "The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows
the Needle can," said Dickinson.<br>
We're seldom the engine of those groups, but we can be the steady
hand on the tiller, and the ones whose instincts help set the
course. Darkness doesn't make us lose our bearings. Sometimes, our
job is to be the needle...<br>
<font size="-1">Emily Johnston<br>
Poet, scribe, climate activist, runner, builder<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://medium.com/@enjohnston/the-darkness-and-the-needle-4abec6ff8792">https://medium.com/@enjohnston/the-darkness-and-the-needle-4abec6ff8792</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17022018/arctic-sea-ice-record-low-extent-alaska-bering-hunting-whales">Alaska's
Bering Sea Lost a Third of Its Sea Ice in Just 8 Days</a></b><br>
BY: SABRINA SHANKMAN<br>
Globally, sea ice is at record lows as the polar regions warm faster
than the rest of the planet. Along the Alaska coast, that's
affecting people's lives. <br>
In just eight days in mid-February, nearly a third of the sea ice
covering the Bering Sea off Alaska's west coast disappeared. That
kind of ice loss and the changing climate as the planet warms is
affecting the lives of the people who live along the coast.<br>
At a time when the sea ice should be growing toward its maximum
extent for the year, it's shrinking instead—the area of the Bering
Sea covered by ice is now 60 percent below its average from
1981-2010.<br>
"[Bering sea ice] is in a league by itself at this point," said
Richard Thoman, the climate science and services manager for the
National Weather Service Alaska region. "And looking at the weather
over the next week, this value isn't going to go up significantly.
It's going to go down."..<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17022018/arctic-sea-ice-record-low-extent-alaska-bering-hunting-whales">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17022018/arctic-sea-ice-record-low-extent-alaska-bering-hunting-whales</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html">This
Day in Climate History February 18, 2004 </a> - from D.R.
Tucker</b></font><br>
February 18, 2004: Sixty scientists, including several Nobel<br>
laureates, issue a joint statement denouncing the George W. Bush<br>
administration for distorting, downplaying and disregarding
scientific<br>
findings on such issues as human-caused climate change.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html">http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html</a></font><br>
<br>
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