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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>September 17, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[learning from the storm]<br>
<b>Hurricane Sally's Fierce Rain Shows How Climate Change Raises
Storm Risks</b><br>
Staggering rain totals, fueled by a warming atmosphere that can hold
more moisture, are being recorded from the storm.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/hurricane-sally-climate-change.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/hurricane-sally-climate-change.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
[performance activism]<br>
<b>Join the Global Rebellion | Extinction Rebellion Global</b><br>
Sep 16, 2020<br>
This is a climate and ecological emergency. We want to live, we have
to act now. Join The Rebellion & Rebel for Life.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUe3zFYxYac">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUe3zFYxYac</a><br>
<p><br>
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[astounding photojournalism in the NYTimes]<br>
<b>AZUSA, CALIF. The Ranch 2 Fire burned more than 4,200 acres, part
of the worst wildfire season in California history.</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/20/magazine/20mag-Climate2-Images/20mag-Climate2-Images-superJumbo.jpg">https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/20/magazine/20mag-Climate2-Images/20mag-Climate2-Images-superJumbo.jpg</a><br>
- - <br>
<b>HOW CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL RESHAPE AMERICA</b><br>
Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?<br>
By Abrahm Lustgarten<br>
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A
surge in air-conditioning broke the state's electrical grid, leaving
a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by
the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had
recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth --
130 degrees in Death Valley -- and an otherworldly storm of
lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe,
thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered
grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by
climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst
five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire...<br>
- -<br>
This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms -- all of it
making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation.
Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West,
while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas
to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines
of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes
are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly
uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the
Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25
people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020,
another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree
heat -- 20 more days than the previous record...<br>
- -<br>
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans
finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their
lives? And if so -- if a great domestic relocation might be in the
offing -- was it possible to project where we might go? To answer
these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts:
economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance
executives, architects and urban planners, and I mapped out the
danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years.
The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the
Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire
projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and
others; and data about America's shifting climate niches, an
evolution of work first published by The Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences last spring. (See a detailed analysis of the
maps.)<br>
<br>
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation.
Across the United States, some 162 million people -- nearly one in
two -- will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their
environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of
them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our
analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at
least four million Americans could find themselves living at the
fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.
The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida
officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways
against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation's federal
flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of
its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the
country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status
quo.<br>
<br>
By 2070, some 28 million people across the country could face
Manhattan-size megafires. In Northern California, they could become
an annual event...<br>
- -<br>
<br>
There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of
Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from
roughly one-third in 2016, and three out of four now describe
climate change as either "a crisis" or "a major problem." This year,
Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of
farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care
as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason
Universities found that even Republicans' views are shifting: One in
three now think climate change should be declared a national
emergency.<br>
<br>
Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what's next, now
face brutal choices about which communities to save -- often at
exorbitant costs -- and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will
almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off
relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for
themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst
environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual
perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat
reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and
financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It
begins when even places like California's suburbs are no longer
safe.<br>
<br>
It has already begun...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[video - "these are climate fires"]<br>
<b>"These Are Climate Fires": Oregon Firefighter Ecologist Says
Devastating Blazes Are a Wake-Up Call</b><br>
Sep 14, 2020<br>
Democracy Now!<br>
President Trump has said little about the wildfires raging in
California, Oregon and Washington for three weeks, other than to
suggest poor forest management was primarily to blame. But the
states' governors are pushing back and directly linking the fires to
the climate crisis. "These are climate fires," says Timothy
Ingalsbee, an Oregon-based wildland fire ecologist and former
wildland firefighter who now directs Firefighters United for Safety,
Ethics, and Ecology. "Though some scientists hesitate to attribute a
single event to climate change, these are exactly the conditions
predicted by climatologists."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kwIg1Xl74">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kwIg1Xl74</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
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[CBS speaks openly]<br>
<b>Large chunk of ice breaks off Arctic ice shelf in Greenland</b><br>
Sep 15, 2020<br>
CBS News<br>
A 42-mile stretch of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, the Arctic's largest
remaining ice shelf, has broken off and shattered near Greenland.
Recent record temperatures have hit the shelf particularly hard. CBS
News' Ian Lee takes a look.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIfVjQLwlfA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIfVjQLwlfA</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[the former governor of California]<br>
<b>Jerry Brown, on talk of California exodus, says, 'Where are you
going to go?'</b><br>
From his ranch, the former California governor is experiencing the
same smoky air wafting through much of the state. "We are causing
this," he declared in an interview.<br>
<br>
By ADAM NAGOURNEY - Sep. 14, 2020 <br>
The New York Times<br>
LOS ANGELES -- Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, could
barely make out the mountains in the distance from his ranch in the
city of Williams on Sunday. Every few minutes, he picked up his
phone to check the latest air quality reading. "Unhealthy," he said.<br>
<br>
Brown, who served over 45 years in state government and politics,
has been warning about this day for years. But he said by telephone
from his ranch that he never expected this moment to come so soon.
And he never thought the air around his home, which he built in the
wilderness of his family ranch, an hour's drive north of Sacramento,
would be this shrouded.<br>
<br>
But still, for all the fire and the smoke, Brown presented himself
as the resolute chief ambassador for the state that has so long been
associated with the Brown family name. He declared he was not going
anywhere and dismissed the latest round of talk about people fleeing
California.<br>
"You might say, 'We are getting out of here -- we are going
someplace else,' " Brown, 82, said. "No. There are going to be
problems everywhere in the United States. This is the new normal.
It's been predicted, and it's happening. This is part of the new
long-term experience."<br>
<br>
"Tell me: Where are you going to go?" Brown continued. "What's your
alternative? Maybe Canada. You're going to go to places like Iowa,
where you have intensifying tornadoes? The fact is, we have a global
crisis that has been mounting and the scientists have been telling
us about. For the most part, it's been ignored. Now we have a
graphic example."<br>
Brown, a Democrat, served twice as California's governor. He retired
to make way for Gavin Newsom, his lieutenant governor, who took
office in January 2019.<br>
<br>
Newsom has inherited the burden of managing a state besieged by the
coronavirus pandemic and the worst wildfires in its history.<br>
<br>
As governor, and after his departure, Brown became an international
environmental advocate, pushing back against President Donald Trump
and other Republicans who sought to roll back environmental
protections enacted in Washington and in California. Since leaving
office, Brown has run the California-China Institute at the
University of California, Berkeley, and served as the executive
chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.<br>
<br>
Brown said the fast-moving fires made it clear that a global effort
was needed to reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gases.
California, which has over the years sought to wean itself from
fossil fuels, and the United States cannot deal with the scope of
the problem alone, he said, adding that Trump's election, and his
efforts to undo environmental laws and regulations, had been a major
setback.<br>
<br>
Brown acknowledged that the devastating fires were partly the result
of the failure of the state and the federal government to thin
forests, which are now filled with trees that died in the drought --
fuel for the fires.<br>
And he said that ingrained policies in states like California, with
its sprawl, devotion to single-family houses and reliance on
automobiles, had also contributed to the crisis.<br>
<br>
"California for 10,000 years had no more than 300,000 people," he
said. "In the last 100 years, we have gone to a couple of million
people to 40 million, and over 30 million vehicles spilling out 18
million tons of fossil fuels. We are assaulting the environment. We
are causing this."<br>
<br>
He added: "To change all this -- well, it's like telling people who
live in a flood zone that they can't rebuild their homes after a
flood. You're talking about shaping the behavior of millions of free
human beings, getting them to change their behavior. It's not easy."<br>
Brown's ranch is not near any of the wildfires, but the smoke has
settled over it.<br>
<br>
"I see the oak trees," he said, "but it's very hard to see the
mountains."<br>
<br>
Checking the weather app on his phone, Brown compared the air
quality index of Williams with that of Los Angeles, which had long
been a national symbol of smog.<br>
"That's better," he said after looking at the Los Angeles figure.
"You're at 144 for unhealthy air for some individuals. We're
unhealthy for everybody. We have 191." (A reading of 151 or over is
considered unhealthy for the general population.)<br>
<br>
Brown declined to share what, if any, advice he might have for
Newsom in managing the twin crises plaguing the state. But he did
have some ideas for what he might say to Trump, who was visiting
Monday to tour the fire damage, if he were still governor.<br>
<br>
"He's presiding over a demolition derby on our environment that's
got to stop," Brown said. He paused a moment. "Whether you tell him
that now when you are asking for billions of dollars -- I think I'd
wait a couple of days."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/jerry-brown-on-a-california-exodus-tell-me-where-are-you-going-to-go.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/jerry-brown-on-a-california-exodus-tell-me-where-are-you-going-to-go.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
September 17, 2014</b></font><br>
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman observes:<br>
<blockquote>"There remain several possible responses to climate
change. One is stupidity: 'There is no crisis.' (A subset of this
is to acknowledge the crisis privately, but deny it or choose to
ignore it publicly.) A second is hopelessness: 'It's all over.'
(Sadly, many of my friends fall into this category.) A third is
blind faith in technology, as if it were easier to modify the
power of nature than to change a system that resists not only
radical change but even tinkering.<br>
<br>
"But a fourth is action, a fight to regain democracy (a.k.a. 'who
is government for?') and begin to remember quaint little slogans
like 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' to recognize
that the payoff for seriously fighting climate change is not only
the survival of our species (and others) but a better society. As
Naomi Klein says, 'Climate change isn't just a disaster. It's also
our best chance to demand and build a better world.'<br>
<br>
"That's what makes this march important. To paraphrase Bill
McKibben, it's not so much about changing light bulbs as it is
about changing the system that's powering our destruction."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/mark-bittman-lets-reject-the-inevitable.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/mark-bittman-lets-reject-the-inevitable.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone</a><br>
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