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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>May 6, 2021</b></font></i> <br>
</p>
[uh oh -another warning]<br>
<b>Global heating pace risks ‘unstoppable’ sea level rise as
Antarctic ice sheet melts</b><br>
World faces ‘abrupt jump’ in pace of ice loss around 2060 unless
emissions reduced to meet Paris agreement goals, study warns...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/05/antarctica-ice-sheet-melting-global-heating-sea-level-rise-study">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/05/antarctica-ice-sheet-melting-global-heating-sea-level-rise-study</a><br>
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</p>
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</p>
<br>
[Telling us the truth before we were listening]<br>
<br>
<b>‘Decades ahead of his time’: history catches up with visionary
Jimmy Carter</b><br>
<br>
<br>
Megan Mayhew Bergman - 4 May 2021 1<br>
<br>
<br>
A new film rejects the popular narrative and recasts the former
president, 96, as hugely prescient thinker, particularly on climate
change<br>
- -<br>
Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp
focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and
justice.<br>
<br>
<b>Carterland: preview of the documentary on former president Jimmy
Carter – video </b><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/MFt8sZR4ljw">https://youtu.be/MFt8sZR4ljw</a><br>
<br>
“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the
film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or
ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades
ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable
energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities,
equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly
impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so
very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”...<br>
- -<br>
The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a
heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently
begun to look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral
bearing.<br>
<br>
“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.<br>
<br>
“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock
offers. “Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as
Carter.”<br>
<br>
“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis
on servant,” Biden says.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/y7WVi_RFzTw">https://youtu.be/y7WVi_RFzTw</a><br>
<br>
Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden –
who became the first elected official outside of Georgia to support
Carter’s bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried
him as an “exuberant” idealist at the time.<br>
<br>
- -<br>
<br>
One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching
documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that
Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our
dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable
energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path
mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House,
politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe
endeavor.<br>
<br>
“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and
ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We
had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit
of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and
destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”...<br>
- -<br>
Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty,
responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or
no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born
with it.”<br>
<br>
While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to
portray Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist
that his presidency was more successful than history has
acknowledged, particularly on the energy, conservation and human
rights fronts. Still, there are aspects of his single term that will
probably remain embedded in his narrative, such as his tenuous
relationship with Congress, early catering to segregationists to win
votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.<br>
<br>
What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s
presidency?<br>
<br>
“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,”
film-maker Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what
qualities do you actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who
will challenge you to be better, or speak in catchphrases and not
ask much of you?<br>
<br>
“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another
Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”...<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/03/jimmy-carter-climate-change-carterland-film-biography">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/03/jimmy-carter-climate-change-carterland-film-biography</a><br>
<p><br>
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<p><br>
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[Silence is the only wrong]<br>
<b>The conventional wisdom on how to talk about climate change? It’s
wrong.</b><br>
Faith Kearns’ new book offers insights from conversations IRL.<br>
Kate Yoder, Associate Editor - May 04, 2021<br>
<p>Faith Kearns thought she knew how to talk about science. In 2008,
she was getting a doctorate in environmental science from the
University of California, Berkeley, and had worked in
communications for years. Then she spoke at a community fire
safety demonstration in Northern California. She and her
colleagues followed all the conventional advice about what to say,
but something felt off.<br>
<br>
After the presentation, a man came up to Kearns, emotional.
Listening to them present steps of what he should have done to
protect his home from fire had been traumatizing. Just a few
months before, wildfires had burned through this small community
in Mendocino County. For her audience, the memory was still fresh,
the wounds raw.<br>
<br>
“I knew those fires that happened, but I didn’t put together that
we were going to be talking to people who were directly affected
by that fire, and that talking about things they should do raised
a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, a lot of trauma,” Kearns said in
an interview with Grist. Her rigorous academic training had not
prepared her for this — and maybe it had made things worse. “That
really forced me into a reckoning about what science communication
is,” she said. “And I’m still reckoning with it.”<br>
<br>
Kearns’ new book, <u>Getting to the Heart of Science
Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement</u>, out this
month, argues that there’s no one “right” approach to talking
about the climate crisis and other contentious scientific issues.
She collects anecdotes and advice from science communicators who
are wrestling with all of the feelings and opinions that climate
change, genetically modified foods, and vaccines tend to stir up.
<br>
<br>
She tells stories of an environmental journalist fielding
desperate calls from New Jersey residents during Hurricane Sandy;
a professor trying to help college students who felt helpless
learning about climate change; and a scientist breaking the news
to homeowners in Charleston, South Carolina, that their properties
will soon be underwater. (Sometimes, climate scientists are like
doctors delivering bad news to patients.)<br>
<br>
The book holds lessons for anyone who wants to take on the
challenge of talking about loaded scientific topics, and it
addresses misconceptions and oversimplifications about the best
way to do it. <br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: It’s all about crafting the right message.</b><br>
No matter how pretty your slideshow is or how carefully you’ve
curated your talking points, it will probably fall flat with
people who have lived through a disaster. Good communication is
two-sided, Kearns writes, requiring empathy and listening. <br>
<br>
“It’s really absurd to think that you would have a class on
‘public listening,’ right?” Kearns joked. “Whereas like ‘public
speaking’ is this ubiquitous thing. At some point, I start to
wonder: Who’s doing all the listening to all this public
speaking?”<br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: If people just know the facts, they’ll change how they
act. Right?</b><br>
For a long time, scientists have relied on a “deficit” model of
communication. The idea is that if people are given enough facts
and data about, say, climate change, then they’d accept the
science— in a logical, rational way — and decide to take action.
This idea isn’t necessarily wrong, but it ignores the messiness of
the world and the role that emotions play in guiding decisions.
“We’ve just sort of neglected many other pieces of communicating
that don’t have to do with providing information,” Kearns said. <br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: Scientists can be and should be totally objective.</b><br>
It’s time to change the assumption that scientists ought to be
cool, calm, collected intellectuals who stoop down to talk to
journalists every once in a while, Kearns argues. After all,
scientists are part of the public, too, and with wildfires and
hurricanes growing in intensity, they’re often living through the
very effects they’re studying. She says true objectivity is
impossible. <br>
<br>
“Indeed, what the debate over science advocacy has regularly
glossed over is that there are at least as many ethical concerns
with standing on the sidelines as there are with engaging,” she
writes.<br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: People just need to “listen to the science.”</b><br>
“The landscape of climate communication has been dominated by a
particular type of argumentation: ‘You’re with us or you’re
against us,’” Kearns said. So it follows that the underlying
reasons people dismiss climate science have more to do with
political identity than logic. You can see this same story play
out vividly with COVID-19.<br>
<br>
Kearns says that the label of “climate denier” has been applied
too broadly, making matters worse. “We end up in these very
contentious spaces, where the ability to have complex
conversations is just really, really lost.”<br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: Climate communicators need to learn how to elicit the
“right” emotions.</b><br>
A long-standing debate on Twitter — and in academic research —
centers on one question. What’s the better way to get people to
care about climate change: Scare them into action or give them
hope so they don’t become hopeless? The whole idea of trying to
use emotions as levers to get people to care “feels very false,”
Kearns said. “What I’m talking about is just dealing with very
strong emotions that actually already exist on all of these
topics.”<br>
<br>
Though it might not sound like the most interesting topic, people
have strong opinions about water, just waiting to bubble up. “I
can show up on a Saturday morning at a community center, and there
will be 40 people there who are really interested in talking about
water in California, and they have very, very strong feelings
about it.”<br>
<br>
<b>MYTH: Good conversations steer away from conflict.</b><br>
“Actually, the absence of conflict, to me, tends to mean that
people aren’t invested in a topic,” Kearns said. She’s
conflict-averse herself, so she understands wanting to avoid a
shouting match. But she says that conflict needs to be more
accepted, or “normalized,” because it can be a start to an
effective conversation. The more people become used to having
disagreements without getting overheated, the easier they are to
navigate. <br>
<br>
“There’s a lot of richness within conflict, and maybe getting more
comfortable with operating in a conflict space might actually help
us to figure out better how to proceed.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/article/the-conventional-wisdom-on-how-to-talk-about-climate-change-its-wrong/">https://grist.org/article/the-conventional-wisdom-on-how-to-talk-about-climate-change-its-wrong/</a><br>
</p>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Anxiety]<br>
<b>The New Yorker The Climate Crisis</b><br>
Even as we begin to emerge from the stress of the pandemic year,
mental-health professionals are noting a steady uptick in a
different form of anxiety—the worry over climate change and the
future that it will bring. The latest survey research from Yale and
George Mason universities shows about forty per cent of Americans
feeling “disgusted” or “helpless” about global warming; a poll from
the American Psychiatric Association last autumn found that
fifty-five per cent of respondents were concerned about the effects
of climate change on their own mental health. The effects seem
particularly harsh on new mothers, and, indeed, a fear of adding to
the climate problem and of the disintegration it might cause seems
to be deterring large numbers of young people from having kids of
their own. Understandably, the fear of a wrecked future increases as
you descend the age scale: a March survey of Gen-Z Americans aged
between fourteen and twenty-four found that eighty-three per cent
are concerned about the health of the planet (although nearly half
said that they have been feeling a little better since Biden took
office).<br>
<br>
Perhaps there are ways in which this fear is a luxury—Sarah Jaquette
Ray, who literally wrote the book on climate anxiety, noted recently
that it is an “overwhelmingly white” phenomenon. Not because people
of color care less about the climate crisis (in fact, they care
more), but because they’ve faced other existential crises. “The
prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional
terrain for Black and brown people, whether that terrain is racism
or climate change,” Ray wrote. “Exhaustion, anger, hope—the effects
of oppression and resistance are not unique to this climate moment.
What is unique is that people who had been insulated from oppression
are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future.”
Eric Holthaus, in his always interesting Substack newsletter on
climate, echoed some of these thoughts, after describing his own
anxiety as so crippling that, during attacks that lasted weeks, he’d
“been unable to write, unable to interact with friends, unable to
function normally.” But, he said, since those “who have already been
marginalized by centuries of oppression will be hurt the worst . . .
our job, as the climate anxious, is to repair that oppression,
repair that marginalization, to make sure you’re not offloading your
anxiety onto someone else in ways that are causing more harm.”<br>
<br>
That’s fair enough—action has always seemed the best salve to me.
(And for those for whom it is not enough, the Climate Psychology
Alliance North America has published a directory of
“climate-informed therapists.”) But I think there’s another reason
that climate change can be so uniquely anxiety-producing: we’re not
used to dealing with fights that we don’t know we can win. Martin
Luther King, Jr.,’s statement, quoting the abolitionist Theodore
Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
toward justice” was comforting in a civil-rights fight that
required—and requires—enormous courage: they meant, I think, “this
may take a while, but we’re going to win.” But a different kind of
courage is needed for the climate battle, because the arc of the
physical universe is short and it bends toward heat. If we don’t win
soon, we will never win, because the Earth is rushing toward
irrevocable tipping points. We’ve already passed some—there’s no
plan afoot to refreeze the Arctic. And clearly things will get much
worse before they (possibly) start to stabilize; we’ve raised the
temperature a degree Celsius already, and the most optimistic
thinkers on the planet reckon that we might just be able to top out
at 1.5 degrees.<br>
<br>
All of which is to say that we are right to be anxious. There are
profound reasons to hope that we’re about to make serious progress:
the sudden arrival of cheap renewable energy; the shifting
zeitgeist. (As is often the case, Rebecca Solnit sums them up with
particular power.) Even if we catch some breaks from physics,
though, it’s going to be a tough few decades. And what will make it
toughest may be the (very American) assumption that we have to
endure the anxiety by ourselves, in our own heads. I’ve found the
simple solidarity of movements at least as useful as the
opportunities for action that they provide; just knowing that lots
of other people are at work on the same problem is a solace, and a
goad to keep working. It’s one reason I’m glad that vaccinations are
proceeding apace. It’ll be strategically useful to be back in the
streets, but it will also be psychologically useful: we are shoulder
to shoulder on Zoom, but it’s not quite the same.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://link.newyorker.com/view/5e4f6ed6954fcf61233b06c1e54ak.ovj/4d9d332c">https://link.newyorker.com/view/5e4f6ed6954fcf61233b06c1e54ak.ovj/4d9d332c</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[NYT opinion - must see 7 min video - nations compared to US]<br>
<b>The United States has a schizophrenic relationship with the
environment.</b><br>
It boasts a spectacular system of more than 400 national park sites;
a robust environmental lobby; and strong federal environmental law,
including the landmark Endangered Species Act, which is credited
with saving the bald eagle and the grizzly bear from extinction.<br>
<br>
Yet it also harbors a dark side, including an insatiable appetite
for fossil fuels; a longstanding romance with behemoth, gas-guzzling
vehicles; and perhaps the highest per capita generation of plastic
waste in the world.<br>
<br>
For the video above, we collated data and other information about
America’s posture on the environment and presented them to people
from other countries that, in some ways, have made the United
States, the wealthiest country in the world, seem like an
environmental laggard...<br>
Their reactions? Well, check out the video to find out. But an
Indian participant seemed to speak for everyone when he remarked,
his face furrowed in dismay, “That’s … that’s America?”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opinion/climate-change-recycling-america.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opinion/climate-change-recycling-america.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming May
6, 2001 </b></font><br>
<p>May 6, 2001: The New York Times reports on EPA Administrator
Christine Todd Whitman's persona-non-grata status in the George W.
Bush administration:<br>
<br>
"Mrs. Whitman was greeted like a political star when she arrived
here several months ago to run the Environmental Protection
Agency. Not a single senator, not even her Democratic rivals,
opposed her appointment. <br>
<br>
"But no sooner had the former New Jersey governor unpacked her
bags than she found her authority undercut by the very man who had
lured her to Washington, George W. Bush.<br>
<br>
"The most recent snub occurred when the White House openly
contradicted a claim she made on national television two weeks ago
that the administration might back away from its plans to open up
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling amid growing
opposition in Congress.<br>
<br>
"Only weeks earlier, Mrs. Whitman declared that Mr. Bush intended
to fulfill a campaign pledge to lower carbon dioxide emissions
from power plants -- only to find that the president had decided
against that policy without so much as telling his chief
environmental overseer.<br>
<br>
"So it is not surprising that the public embarrassments Mrs.
Whitman has had to endure at the hands of her new boss are giving
rise to questions about her ability to lead the environmental
agency, though she and the White House insist that there is no
strife and that she is an important voice in the administration...<br>
<br>
"The recent setbacks also threaten to undermine the credibility of
Mrs. Whitman, a politician whose plain-spoken manner and seemingly
moderate political views had made her one of the nation's most
prominent governors and at one point a potential vice presidential
candidate.<br>
<br>
"Indeed, Mrs. Whitman's nomination to head the environmental
agency cheered many people on the left -- despite her mixed record
on the environment in New Jersey -- who were wary of the
conservative Republican crowd that had moved into the White House.
But those very same people are no longer so optimistic that her
voice will be heard within the new administration."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/nyregion/hitting-ground-limping-for-whitman-chaos-her-wake-sharp-elbows-her-future.html?pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/nyregion/hitting-ground-limping-for-whitman-chaos-her-wake-sharp-elbows-her-future.html?pagewanted=all</a><br>
</p>
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