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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>May 9, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[means everyone]<br>
<b>The World Is Waking Up to the Truth That Natural Gas Is Dirty</b><br>
The U.N.’s new Global Methane Report throws cold water on a longtime
fossil fuel industry talking point.<br>
Kate Aronoff/May 7, 2021...<br>
There are, as the “Global Methane Assessment” notes, several
straightforward ways to decrease the amount of methane currently
spewing from gas supply chains with existing technology, including
new regulations on existing operations. But continuing to replace
coal with gas threatens to lock in a fuel source that needs to
decline rapidly. The report notes that in climate models that rely
minimally on the prospect of low-cost miracle technologies emerging
to save us, “global production of gas has to decline annually by ~3%
over 2020–2030 to be consistent with a 1.5° C pathway. This
corresponds to a decrease in gas usage by roughly one-third by 2030,
whereas current plans and projections are for an increase of ~20
percent relative to 2020 usage.”<br>
<br>
As the report’s lead author, Drew Shindell, underlined at a press
conference announcing it, “One thing the report calls for very
strongly is not building any more of this fossil fuel
infrastructure. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to
do is stop digging.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/162337/un-methane-report-natural-gas-dirty">https://newrepublic.com/article/162337/un-methane-report-natural-gas-dirty</a><br>
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[nature]<br>
<b>Fevers are plaguing the oceans — and climate change is making
them worse</b><br>
Sudden marine heatwaves can devastate ecosystems, and scientists are
scrambling to predict when they will strike.<br>
Giuliana Viglione - 5 MAY 2021<br>
Ten years ago, dead fish began washing ashore on the beaches of
Western Australia. The culprit was a huge swathe of unusually warm
water that ravaged kelp forests and scores of commercially important
marine creatures, from abalone to scallops to lobster. Over the
following weeks, some of Western Australia’s most lucrative
fisheries came close to being wiped out. To this day, some of them
have not recovered.<br>
<br>
After the crisis, scientists came together to assess the damage and
try to understand what had caused the unusual warming. “This event
really had such devastating consequences for marine ecosystems,”
says Jessica Benthuysen, a physical oceanographer at the Australian
Institute of Marine Science in Perth.<br>
<br>
Since that event, researchers have seen dozens of similar hot spells
in ocean regions around the world and have now given them a name —
marine heatwaves. Although scientists have come up with a few
different ways to define the events, they generally agree that they
involve warm spells in surface waters of the ocean that last at
least five days and reach a temperature threshold well above the
normal range.<br>
<br>
The effects of marine heatwaves can reverberate up the food chain,..<br>
- -<br>
And scientists predict that those trends will continue. Several
studies have shown that even under moderate warming scenarios,
almost all of the ocean will experience more-frequent and
longer-lasting marine heatwaves over the coming years.<br>
<br>
Many of the extreme events over the past several decades have been
made worse by climate change, too. A 2020 study7 examining seven of
the highest-impact marine heatwaves since 1981 concluded that all
but one were at least partially due to human-driven warming (see
‘Four decades of marine heatwaves’). The researchers compared
climate model simulations using pre-industrial concentrations of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with model runs using present-day
concentrations...<br>
- -<br>
The results showed that some of the events were so strong that they
were fully attributable to anthropogenic climate change, says
Charlotte Laufkötter, a climate scientist at the University of Bern
in Switzerland who led that work. “In pre-industrial times, they
couldn’t have occurred.”<br>
<br>
And at some point in the next century, scientists project that much
of the ocean will have warmed past the temperature threshold that
defines these events — plunging many parts of the world into a state
of permanent marine heatwave. “If we have such strong warming,”
Laufkötter says, “it’s not an extreme event any more. It’s always
there.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01142-4">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01142-4</a><br>
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[find out the answers]<br>
<b>Climate change: how bad could the future be if we do nothing?</b><br>
May 6, 2021<br>
The climate crisis is no longer a looming threat – people are now
living with the consequences of centuries of greenhouse gas
emissions. But there is still everything to fight for. How the world
chooses to respond in the coming years will have massive
repercussions for generations yet to be born.<br>
<br>
In my book How to Save Our Planet, I imagine two different visions
of the future. One in which we do very little to address climate
change, and one in which we do everything possible.<br>
- - <br>
Global diets have shifted away from meat. Farming efficiency has
greatly improved during the transition from industrial-scale meat
production to plant-based sustenance, creating more land to rewild
and reforest.<br>
<br>
Half of the Earth is dedicated to restoring the natural biosphere
and its ecological services. Elsewhere, fusion energy is finally set
to work at scale providing unlimited clean energy for the people of
the 22nd century.<br>
<br>
Two very different futures. The outcome your children and
grandchildren will live with depends on what decisions are made
today. Happily, the solutions I propose are win-win, or even
win-win-win: they reduce emissions, improve the environment and make
people healthier and wealthier overall.<br>
<br>
This article is based on Mark Maslin’s latest book, <u>How to Save
Our Planet: The Facts.</u><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-how-bad-could-the-future-be-if-we-do-nothing-159665">https://theconversation.com/climate-change-how-bad-could-the-future-be-if-we-do-nothing-159665</a>
<p>- - <br>
</p>
[buy the book]<br>
<b>How To Save Our Planet The Facts</b><br>
Mark A. Maslin<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320/320155/how-to-save-our-planet/9780241472521.html">https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320/320155/how-to-save-our-planet/9780241472521.html</a><br>
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[watch out for this]<br>
<b>Americans can't keep ignoring the dozens of states sneaking
through laws that attack the right to protest and make it more
dangerous to take to the streets</b><br>
Dana Fisher - May 8, 2021<br>
<blockquote>- Republican-led state legislatures in several dozen
states have passed laws severely limiting the right to protest. <br>
<br>
- This is a consequence of a GOP takeover at the state level while
Democrats focus on the federal level. <br>
<br>
- Americans need to pay attention to what's going on in their
states or it will be too late. <br>
</blockquote>
The Republican party is waging an attack on our democracy at the
state level — and getting away with it. <br>
<br>
In the past few weeks, bills have been passed through Republican-led
legislatures in Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
Montana, Florida, and several other states. <br>
<br>
These bills include draconian provisions to limit peaceful protest,
like increasing penalties for blocking streets, expanding the
definition of a riot so that it applies to groups as small as three
people, and making it legally defensible for drivers to run over
protesters with their cars. The bills are a clear response to the
unprecedented wave of predominantly peaceful protests against police
brutality and systemic racism that swept over the country last
summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the
indigenous-led protests that target projects that expand fossil fuel
infrastructure.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Immunity for drivers who run over protesters</b><br>
Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis became the fourth Republican governor to
sign what he called an "anti-riot" bill into Florida law. The new
law in Florida empowers the state to overrule municipalities'
decisions to reduce police budgets and makes it a felony to destroy
historical structures, including (Confederate) flags and memorials,
during protests. It also grants civil immunity to people driving
into crowds of protesters.<br>
<br>
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a similar law, enacting criminal
penalties for those protesting in the street, while granting
criminal and civil immunity to drivers who harm said protesters.<br>
<br>
These driver immunity bills would make it legally defensible for
people like neo-Nazi James Alex Fields to drive their cars into
peaceful protests and hit innocent protesters like Heather Heyer,
who was killed when she was hit by Fields' car while demonstrating
against the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia in
August 2017. Participants in the January 6 insurgency in Washington,
DC should consider themselves extremely lucky no such law was in
place when they marched without a legal permit from the
demonstration at the Washington Monument to storm the US Capitol. <br>
<br>
<b>A consequence of GOP takeover at the state level</b><br>
Across the country, while efforts to limit voting have been
introduced in most states and have gained substantial attention,
more than 90 bills have been simultaneously introduced across 35
states that aim to reduce citizen's right to assemble and protest.
These attacks on the very foundation of democratic participation —
voting and peaceful assembly — are the most recent example of a
coordinated effort by the Right to target policies at the
state-level while all eyes are on a new Democratic president and his
high-profile efforts to implement progressive change at the federal
level. <br>
<br>
After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a
coordinated effort by conservative funders to use their "dark money"
to push back against Democratic wins and the new president's agenda.
That effort took the form of activism through the Tea Party and
state-level initiatives to change the political make up of
legislatures across the country. By the early months of the Trump
presidency eight years later, the Democratic Party was seen as
"being hollowed out from below" with Republicans in control of both
chambers of state legislatures in 34 states and Democrats having
ceded 13 governorships to the GOP.<br>
<br>
Rather than targeting state houses, the GOP's coordinated efforts
today target citizens' constitutional rights to participate in our
democracy. The focus is on limiting citizens' capacity by
restricting voting and penalizing those who participate in peaceful
demonstrations in their communities. <br>
<br>
These efforts specifically target the forms of civic participation
most available to the least powerful in our society. Beyond voting,
people with limited power and scant access to institutional politics
tend to take advantage of the rights afforded by the Constitution to
voice their opinions as outsiders demonstrating in the streets.
America is built on the foundation of empowering the powerless by
letting them take to the streets to be heard and affect social
change. <br>
<br>
Efforts to restrict voting and penalize individuals who participate
in protest are part of the consistent conservative strategy to
respond to Democratic political gains at the national level by
pushing back at the state level. Even as the Republican Party
appears to be struggling nationally to keep itself together, the
level of coordination at the state level tells a very different
story. Indeed, the past shows that if inadequate attention is paid
to what is happening in the states, the Right will once again build
a powerful platform to affect their agenda. In addition to pushing
for democratic reform through federal bills such as the "For the
People Act," citizens across the US must respond to these
state-level efforts to limit our democracy with resistance. <br>
<p>If the past six years have taught us anything, it is that it is
very easy to distract Americans from what is most important. We,
the people, are capable of great collective change when we're
paying attention. If we don't start paying attention and pushing
against this frightening trend to limit political participation in
our democracy at the state level, by the time this attack on
democracy hits the national level, it will be much too late to
stop it. <br>
</p>
<p>- Dana R. Fisher is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of
the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of
Maryland.</p>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/protest-bills-states-sneaking-through-limit-the-right-to-protest-2021-5">https://www.businessinsider.com/protest-bills-states-sneaking-through-limit-the-right-to-protest-2021-5</a><br>
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[LA Times opinion]<br>
<b>Op-Ed: We can’t hold back rising oceans. We can only move out of
the way</b><br>
Shoreline erosion and coastal retreat have become global issues and
an increasing challenge for California’s coastal cities and
counties. In part that’s because of the state’s concentrated coastal
population, but it’s also because of our coastal-dependent economy
and intensive shoreline development...<br>
- -<br>
The fact is, California’s coastal communities face a challenge of
increasing magnitude — and we have no clear agreed-upon solutions.<br>
<br>
Some communities and neighborhoods are already experiencing coastal
flooding during king tides and periods of large waves. Every coastal
city and county in California needs to determine its most vulnerable
areas and assets and develop response plans with thresholds for
relocation or beginning the process of moving back from the shore.
Thresholds could include when sea level reaches a specific
elevation, or when a street, neighborhood or home is flooded or
damaged a certain number of times during a given period.<br>
<br>
These will need to be community-specific decisions, and it’s not too
early to start these discussions with the rate of sea level rise
accelerating. Even if we don’t know exactly how high the sea level
will be at a specific point in the future, we know that this process
will continue. In the long run, there is no effective way to hold
back the Pacific Ocean.<br>
Gary Griggs is a distinguished professor of earth and planetary
sciences at UC Santa Cruz.<br>
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[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming May
9, 2007 </b></font><br>
May 9, 2007: Grist.org reports on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's
plans to make his company carbon-neutral and conscious of climate
risk, plans that apparently did not involve ending the Fox News
Channel's fixation on attacking climate science.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://grist.org/article/murdoch/">http://grist.org/article/murdoch/</a><br>
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