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<font size="+1"><i>May 7, 2018</i></font><br>
<br>
[warming up fire season]<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCodL0nH66KW-hD__WQocYww"><br>
National Interagency Fire Center</a><br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCodL0nH66KW-hD__WQocYww">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCodL0nH66KW-hD__WQocYww</a></font><br>
- - - -<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://wildfiretoday.com">Wildfire
Today</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wildfiretoday.com">http://wildfiretoday.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[Paid Astroturfing is unsporting]<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/07/whats-my-motivation-for-these-grassroots-protesters-its-just-another-acting-job/">"What's
my motivation?"- For these "Grassroots protesters", it's Just
Another Acting Job</a><br>
May 7, 2018<br>
Acting is a tough business. But there’s one growth area.<br>
<blockquote>"They paid us to sit through the meeting and clap every
time someone said something against wind and solar power," Keith
Keough told The Lens, saying he was not political and just needed
the money."<br>
</blockquote>
"Grass Roots" activists for hire. New story from New Orleans is
consistent with other incidents in recent years.<br>
<br>
<b>New Orleans Times Picayune:</b><br>
Local actors were paid to attend New Orleans City Council meetings
last year in a show of support for a proposed Entergy power plant,
collecting $60 to $200 for performances that at times included
prewritten speeches with talking points favoring the plant - in
other words, "speaking roles," The Lens reports.<br>
"I'm an excellent speaker," an actor told the news site. "I was
their best choice. Of course I had a speaking role, are you
kidding?"<br>
It's not clear who fueled the paid lobbying effort but paying people
to "create the illusion of grassroots support," a practice known as
"astroturfing," is apparently legal, according to The Lens report.<br>
Still, attorneys for a coalition of organizations in opposition to
the power plant say they want state and local officials to
investigate whether this particular instance of astroturfing broke
any laws.<br>
The same coalition has filed a lawsuit alleging that the city
council broke state open-meetings law by keeping some citizens out
of meetings that involved the proposed power plant.<br>
With the paid actors in attendance, an October public hearing was so
packed that some citizens had to wait until the crowd shrank before
they were allowed inside council chambers.<br>
In a statement emailed Friday night, Entergy New Orleans President
and CEO Charles Rice said the company did not pay anyone to attend
the council meetings or direct anyone to attend public meetings.<br>
"Instead, we worked tirelessly to encourage our supporters to take
time from their busy workday schedules to testify on behalf of this
project," Rice said.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/07/whats-my-motivation-for-these-grassroots-protesters-its-just-another-acting-job/">https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/07/whats-my-motivation-for-these-grassroots-protesters-its-just-another-acting-job/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Bering ice melt]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bering-sea-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change-alaska-a8338656.html">Almost
all the ice covering the Bering Sea has melted, throwing Alaska
communities into disarray</a></b><br>
'We've fallen off a cliff: very little sea ice remains in the Bering
Sea'<br>
Josh Gabbatiss<br>
Almost all the ice covering the Bering Sea has melted, scientists
have confirmed, throwing communities living around its shores into
disarray.<br>
The region's ice cover normally persists for at least another month,
and this year it has vanished earlier than any other year except
2017.<br>
Located in the northern Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Russia, the
Bering Sea is experiencing the brunt of climate change and has
already drawn attention this year for unprecedented levels of winter
melting.<br>
In February, soaring Arctic temperatures led to around half the
region's ice disappearing in the space of two weeks.<br>
This trend has continued into spring, and scientists have confirmed
that by the end of April just 10 per cent of normal ice levels
remained.<br>
"We've fallen off a cliff: very little sea ice remains in the Bering
Sea," tweeted Dr Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is based in Alaska.<br>
- - -- <br>
In their report, the International Arctic Research Centre scientists
wrote that while not every year will be as bad as this one, ice
formation is likely to remain low if the Bering Sea's waters remain
warm. <br>
They also warn that communities will need to "prepare for more
winters with low sea ice and stormy conditions".<br>
"Fellow Americans are suffering from a natural disaster," said Dr
Thoman. "While low sea ice is not as dramatic as a wildfire or an
Interstate 95 snowstorm, the impacts and hardships it produces are
just as real."<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bering-sea-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change-alaska-a8338656.html">https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bering-sea-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change-alaska-a8338656.html</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/">UN
forest accounting loophole allows CO2 underreporting by EU, UK,
US</a></b><br>
By Justin Catanoso<br>
2 May 2018<br>
(Mongabay) - For the past ten years, Mary Booth, an ecologist with
the Partnership for Policy Integrity in Pelham, Massachusetts, has
immersed herself in the complex, nuanced, politically charged world
of international carbon emissions accounting models as if the
planet's fate depends on it.<br>
In many ways, it does.<br>
Booth studies how countries count and report their emissions. In
particular, she evaluates whether generating energy via the burning
of wood pellets, or biomass, puts less carbon into the atmosphere
than burning coal. In a rising trend, countries, especially in the
European Union and United Kingdom, are converting existing
coal-fired power plants to burn wood - a renewable, albeit
controversial, fuel source.<br>
Emissions accounting helps determine whether or not nations are on
target to achieve their voluntary Paris Agreement reduction goals.
That agreement also represents the global community's pledge to keep
the world from heating up by just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit) by 2100 from a 1900 baseline (we've already warmed 1
degree Celsius).<br>
Emissions tallies are reported regularly to the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. But those
figures aren't just numbers on paper or political aspirations. The
data, if accurately calculated, tell us how much greenhouse gas
nations are actually putting into the air, and those combined totals
help us know whether we are on target to avert climate change
catastrophe.<br>
Booth is darkly pessimistic - a price she pays for knowing too much,
she told me.<br>
"This is a message that no one has said yet. It's what I believe to
be true: there may not be a pathway to 1.5 [degrees] anymore - at
all. Carbon capture and storage is a fantasy," Booth told me in a
series of interviews for Mongabay. "Growing forests may not work
fast enough. We're not reducing emissions fast enough. The sooner
that story gets told, the sooner people understand what's really
required to keep the earth from burning up." […]<br>
Booth's research - Not carbon neutral: Assessing the net emissions
impact of residues burned for bioenergy, published this February in
the journal Environmental Research Letters - helps answer some
thorny questions critical to our energy and carbon future.<br>
Her study examines the net CO2 emissions of biomass burned to
replace coal at the UK's massive Drax power stations and other EU
power plants. Combined, those energy facilities consume tons of wood
each year.<br>
One major finding, right out of the gate: Booth reports that -
contrary to a largely accepted view - wood pellets aren't sourced
mainly from fallen limbs and lumber waste called residue, but rather
from whole trees. However, she based her study on residue-derived
wood pellets anyway because the biomass industry "so often claims
residues are a main pellet source."<br>
Even based on the false assumption that only wood waste, not whole
trees, are being burnt, Booth found that "up to 95 percent of
cumulative CO2 emitted [by the biomass burning power plants]
represent a net addition to the atmosphere over decades." In other
words, biomass is not carbon neutral.<br>
More disturbing: Booth's research opens up the IPCC to charges that
its policymaking decisions regarding emissions accounting have been
politicized - crafted by negotiators to include built-in loopholes
that allow nations to underreport certain emissions while appearing
to achieve their carbon-reduction targets.<br>
In particular, both the UK and EU appear to have slipped through a
large loophole in order to "disappear" real emissions from their
carbon accounting,..<br>
<font size="-1">more at: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/">https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Video presentation]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea">World
May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking,
Says Cornell Scientist</a></b><br>
By Sharon Kelly<br>
In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the
groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas
fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate
than coal.<br>
In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team,
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell
University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is
playing in changing the world's climate.<br>
The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to
cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord
in just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled
"Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been
Taken," which was posted online on April 4...<br>
- - - -<br>
"We can easily see there is a loss of potential - large amounts of
wind energy - because of the injection of shale gas into our energy
economy," Ingraffea explains in the lecture.<br>
While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and
American energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have
been almost exclusively aimed at just 5 percent of the world's
population, North Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining
95 percent of the world as well.<br>
It's an alarming message - even though the shale rush has stumbled
somewhat as gas prices collapsed and many drillers went bankrupt,
the cumulative impact of American fracking appears to have set the
entire world on a collision course with climate change's most
extreme effects.<br>
The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might
have otherwise, and - far from serving as a bridge fuel - fracking
huge amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in
pushing the world toward a vastly more difficult future.<br>
Ingraffea's lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project's Bedrock
Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewed
below:<br>
video <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4">https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4</a><br>
Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken
by Anthony Ingraffea<br>
Spring Creek Project<br>
Published on Apr 4, 2018<br>
<blockquote>In this lecture "Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble
That Should Not Have Been Taken," Anthony Ingraffea poses that the
fracking boom has placed the world's population in grave risk for
the supposed benefit of a few. Just because one can do something
does not mean that one should, especially if the possible action
is clearly a gamble. The wisdom of experience, and concern for
unpredictable effects broader than the immediate outcome, should
guide a decision to use a new-found capability. Early this
century, gas and oil operators, regulators, and legislators
collectively violated this precept across most of North America.
Having discovered a way to extract gas and oil from a previously
undevelopable source, shale, they forged ahead at unprecedented
scale. This unwise boom led to three compounding results: the
prolongation of the fossil fuel era for decades; the depression of
the deployment of clean renewable energy; and the exacerbation of
climate change. This lecture focuses on these three results of a
risk that should never have been taken, incorporating data on
natural gas production, the slowing of renewable energy
development, and faster-than-predicted global warming. <br>
This talk is a part of the Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and
Climate Change presented by the Spring Creek Project. Dr. Anthony
Ingraffea is the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus
at Cornell University. For his research achievements in hydraulic
fracturing, he won the International Association for Computer
Methods and Advances in Geomechanics "Significant Paper Award,"
and twice won the National Research Council Award for research in
rock mechanics. In 2011, TIME Magazine named him one of its
"People Who Mattered," and he became the first president of
Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy.<br>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4">https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4</a></font><br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea">https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Desdemona Despair]<br>
<a
href="http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/05/who-report-90-per-cent-of-world.html">WHO
report: 90 per cent of world population breathes polluted air</a><br>
2 May 2018 <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1008732">(UN
News)</a> - In a call for Member States to take action urgently,
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom
Gebreyesus, warned that air pollution "threatens us all, but the
poorest and most marginalized people bear the brunt of the burden."<br>
According to WHO's ambient air quality database, despite some
improvements, pollution levels are "still dangerously high" in most
parts of the world.<br>
This includes "many of the world's megacities", according to Dr
Maria Neira, WHO's Director of the Department of Public Health,
Social and Environmental Determinants of Health, who added that air
quality levels in those urban centres, exceed WHO guidelines "by
more than five times".<br>
Covering more than 4,300 cities in 108 countries, the data points to
an estimated 4.2 million deaths each year caused by outdoor air
pollution, with 3.8 million fatalities overall, owing to household
pollutants, linked to cooking....<br>
<a>From:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/05/who-report-90-per-cent-of-world.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1008732">https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1008732</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[Controversial moral failings - video]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQLQjfJp5Y">Community or
Commodity? Why Utah Fails the Moral Challenge of the Climate
Crisis by Stephen Trimble</a></b><br>
In this lecture, Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble
investigates why his neighbors and elected officials stay so angry
about the regulations and protections of the rich public lands
within the state's borders. Trimble includes provocative interviews
with Forrest Cuch, member of the Ute Indian Tribe and former
Director of Indian Affairs for Utah, and Dr. Brian Moench, founder
of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. This talk is a part of
the Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate change, organized
by the Spring Creek Project.<br>
<br>
An award-winning writer, photographer, and editor, Stephen Trimble
has published 25 books, including Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for
the Last Open Spaces in America and Red Rock Stories: Three
Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands. He
has taught writing at the University of Utah, served as board chair
of Utah Interfaith Power & Light, and currently serves on the
advisory board of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQLQjfJp5Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQLQjfJp5Y</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[press release]<br>
Dear all,<br>
Here is a self-promotion to stick in our recent article published in
the Journal of International Migration. Some of you, who are working
on climate migrants and health issues might find it interesting. <br>
Here is the abstract of this paper: <br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12460">Health
Disorder of Climate Migrants in Khulna City: An Urban Slum
Perspective</a></b><br>
<blockquote>Abstract: As the most vulnerable climatic region in the
country, Khulna City is increasingly experiencing
climate‐change‐induced urban problems. For instance, occupancy by
climate migrants, drainage congestion, water logging and reduced
fresh water availability are all increasing problems. In the last
decade, the population in the city increased by more than 20
percent due to migration from nearby climate vulnerable districts.
This study explores the health disorders of climate migrants
occupying the urban slums and squats of the Khulna City area. This
study found that these climate migrants settled in the urban slums
and squats and, as such, they do not have access to urban
amenities such as clean drinking water, hygiene services, and
health facilities. This study noted that these displaced people
are at increased risk of health issues from unhygienic and
overcrowded living conditions and from water and sanitation
problems. They often suffer from different waterborne diseases,
under‐nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. This study
suggests that there is a need for better planning, preparation and
training in Bangladesh to which migrants move, including better
training in health and related services on how to recognize and
respond to health problems that may be slow to manifest. Education
and training also need to be provided for the migrants themselves,
to help them adapt culturally and to enhance their skills and
potential for employment. <br>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1">Link to the article: <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12460">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12460</a></font><br>
<font size="-1">Best wishes,<br>
Md. Mahbubur Rahman <br>
Research and Campaign Associate</font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/">This
Day in Climate History - May 7, 2010</a> - from D.R.
Tucker</b></font><br>
May 7, 2010: Noting that the journal Science has published a letter
from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, calling for an
end to the right wing's war on climate science, Rick Piltz of
Climate Science Watch observes:<br>
<blockquote>"Apparently, a strongly worded statement from many of
our most esteemed scientists, about climate science and a
controversy that is very much in the news and fundamental to our
future, is considered unworthy of space in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. All three rejected
the 700-word, op-ed length letter before it was published [in]
Science."<br>
</blockquote>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/">http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/</a></font><br>
<br>
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