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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>May</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 27, 2023</b></i></font><font
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<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Harvard Medical examines ] </i><br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>Climate Anxiety</b><br>
The existential threat posed by climate change is deeply troubling
to many young people<br>
Youth and Mental Health<br>
by Charles Schmidt </font><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri">Elizabeth Pinsky used to think of
climate change as less a near-term threat than one whose effects
loomed in the distant future. Then headlines about a 2018 climate
report from the United Nations caught her eye. In the report,
scientists claimed that if greenhouse gas emissions continue
unabated, rising sea levels caused by warming temperatures would
likely inundate some global coastlines and intensify droughts and
poverty in other parts of the world by 2040. This was far sooner
than previously projected. “I immediately thought of my two young
kids,” says Pinsky, MD ’06, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at
Massachusetts General Hospital. “I wondered what the world would
look like to them. I started realizing these changes might affect
their lives profoundly — and that would likely affect mine as
well.”<br>
<br>
A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021
reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000
people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described
themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said
the anxiety affects their daily functioning. Since young people
expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their
parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re
losing,” Pinsky says...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">As she feared, damage that threatens the
planet’s future — and the anxiety that this threat can engender —
is affecting the lives of young people. And it has changed her
life: Pinsky now works at the forefront of mental health efforts
to help young people manage the emotional burdens of climate
change.<br>
<br>
<b>Anticipated peril</b><br>
Compared to threats to our physical health from climate change —
heat-related injuries, for instance, or the spread of tropical
diseases — its mental health consequences are less researched. But
emerging studies reveal a mounting toll, especially among young
people. Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high
rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.
Nearly three quarters of the child and adolescent population in
Pakistan experienced learning difficulties after widespread floods
devastated the country in 2010.<br>
<br>
Young people also suffer emotionally from climate change’s
anticipated effects. The twenty-year-old Swedish activist Greta
Thunberg, who chastised world leaders for inaction on carbon
emissions during a speech at the United Nations in 2019, struggled
for years with depression over climate change as young child. For
many young people, worry over threats of future climate change
results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other
symptoms. And those feelings are often amplified by a pervasive
sense that older people aren’t doing enough to fix the climate
problem. “There’s a feeling of intergenerational injustice,” says
Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist based in
Washington, DC, who specializes in the mental health effects of
climate change. “Many young people feel invalidated, betrayed, and
abandoned.”<br>
<br>
Managing these issues poses hard challenges. Research on effective
interventions is virtually nonexistent, and parents and other
people who want to help have little to go on. Professional
organizations are only now beginning to provide needed resources.
The Climate Psychiatry Alliance, whose members span academia and
community care, has a searchable directory of “climate aware”
mental health professionals on its website. These sorts of
licensed therapists are described by the psychiatry alliance as
“professionals who recognize that the climate threat is both a
global threat to all life on Earth, and a deeply personal threat
to the mental and physical well-being … of each individual,
family, and community on the planet.” Another professional group,
the Climate Psychology Alliance, provides a similar directory and
lists support programs and resources for young people, parents,
and teachers...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Pinsky emphasizes that any attempt to help
young people navigate climate-related emotions must start by
acknowledging the validity of their fears. News reports and
researchers often refer to these feelings collectively as climate
anxiety, or eco-anxiety, but Pinsky admits to having misgivings
about the terms.<br>
<br>
“Many people interpret anxiety as a pathological response that
needs to be treated and solved,” she says. “But it’s also a
constructive emotion that gives us time to react in the face of
danger. And anxiety in the face of climate change is a healthy
response to a real threat.”<br>
<br>
Some people manage their climate-triggered emotions without
spiraling into distress. But others become progressively
hyperaroused and panicky, Pinsky says, or else fall into a sort of
emotional paralysis. These reactions can be especially
debilitating for people who already struggle with underlying
mental health disorders. Moreover, anxieties over climate change
can interlace with broader feelings of instability over the pace
of technological and cultural change, argues Ann-Christine
Duhaime, the Nicholas T. Zervas Distinguished Professor of
Neurosurgery at HMS, an associate director of the Mass General
Center for Environment and Health, a pediatric neurosurgeon at
Mass General, and author of Minding the Climate, recently
published by Harvard University Press, which explores connections
between environmental crises and neuroscience. “Technology is
accelerating faster than culture can keep up, and humans in
general are unmoored and struggling to adapt,” she says. “For some
people, climate change is psychologically the last straw. You
realize you can no longer count on the stability of your planet,
your atmosphere — your very world.”...<br>
<br>
<b>Ways of coping</b><br>
Counselors who work in this area travel in relatively uncharted
territory, especially when it comes to managing anticipatory
anxiety over future climate effects. Van Susteren describes that
anxiety as a type of pre-traumatic stress disorder, with few
existing precedents in the United States apart from fears of
nuclear annihilation and the decades-ago experience of living
through classroom drills on how to survive an atom bomb attack.
Talk therapy for anxiety typically aims to help people identify
and replace irrational thoughts, called cognitive distortions,
with alternative thinking that isn’t so stressful. But since
climate anxiety is based on rational fears, this particular
approach risks alienating anyone who might feel their worries are
being dismissed.<br>
<br>
“You don’t want to give the impression that the client’s anxiety
is exaggerated, or rooted in some experience from childhood,” says
Andrew Bryant, a clinical social worker with a private practice in
Seattle, Washington. “Otherwise, clients will think ‘this person
doesn’t get me’ or ‘he’s in denial.’ They will leave and not come
back.”<br>
<br>
Bryant began specializing in climate anxiety in 2016, after nearby
forest fires left much of Washington State blanketed in heavy
smoke. Warming temperatures are fueling larger, more destructive
fires in the Pacific Northwest, and, for Bryant, their effects on
air quality were a wake-up call “that climate change was something
that my clients and I are living with right now.” Younger people
were increasingly arriving at Bryant’s office frightened,
depressed, and confused about how to manage climate-triggered
emotions. Some were even wondering if they should bring children
into such a world.<br>
<br>
Bryant says his first step during counseling is simply to have
people identify and express their feelings about these issues.
“We’re not saying that anxiety is good or bad,” he says. “We just
want to bring those feelings out into the open. It’s more about
validating that climate concerns are reasonable given what we’re
reading in the news every day.”...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Emerging evidence suggests that young people do
best by cultivating a sense of agency and hope despite their
climate concerns. The aim during therapy is for them “to engage
with the world in a way that feels more meaningful and in
alignment with who they are,” Bryant says. But getting to that
point involves talking through feelings like despair, grief, or
rage first. Without doing that, he says, many people get stuck in
maladaptive coping strategies that can lead to burnout,
frustration, or hopelessness. Bryant describes jumping into an
urgent, problem-focused coping strategy as “going into action mode
so you don’t have to feel any grief.”<br>
<br>
Problem-focused coping has a societal benefit in that it leads to
“pro-environmental behavior,” meaning that young people who engage
in it typically spend a lot of time learning about climate change
and focusing on what they can do personally to help solve the
problem. But climate change is far beyond any one person’s
control, and problem-focused coping can leave people frustrated by
the limits of their own capacity and make them unable to rid
themselves of resulting worry and negative emotions, according to
Maria Ojala, an associate professor in psychology at Örebro
University in Sweden.<br>
<br>
Ojala studies how younger people think, feel, and communicate
about global environmental problems and is an author of a 2019
paper in Environment and Behavior on coping strategies young
people are using to deal with their climate change concerns. In
it, she and her colleagues describe emotion-focused coping,
whereby young people ignore or deny climate change as a means of
avoiding feeling anxious about it. In an email, Ojala notes that
people who gravitate toward emotional distancing typically come
from families that communicate about social problems in
“pessimistic doom-and-gloom ways.” But since one type of
emotion-focused coping involves de-emphasizing the climate threat,
she says, it also precludes actions young people might take
against it, and therefore has no environmental upside.<br>
<br>
Ojala and other experts favor a third coping strategy that
balances negative feelings about climate change with faith in the
power of social forces working to overcome it. Called
meaning-focused coping, this approach takes strength from
individual actions and climate beliefs, while “trusting that other
societal actors are also doing their part,” Ojala says in her
paper. And since meaning-focused coping allows negative and
positive climate emotions to coexist, young people who adopt it
have an easier time maintaining hope for the future.<br>
<br>
Pinsky would agree. The overall goal, she says, is for young
people to achieve more resilience in the face of climate change,
so they can function in spite of their environmental concerns.
When people find meaning in what they do, she says, they have a
greater sense of their own agency and self-efficacy. “You’re more
empowered to take action, and that can be a powerful way to deal
with strong negative emotions,” Pinsky says.<br>
<br>
But Duhaime cautions that anyone taking action against climate
change should know they shouldn’t expect a quick payback. The
brain’s reward system, which forms a core of human
decision-making, evolved over eons of history to strengthen neural
associations between actions and outcomes that promote short-term
survival. And that system, she says, responds to the immediate
consequences of what we do. One problem with climate change,
Duhaime says, is that because it’s so vast and complex, people
can’t assume that any single act will lead to a discernible effect
on its trajectory. So, in place of near-term climate improvements,
Duhaime says young people may benefit from seeking the rewards
that come from being part of a group or a movement working to
advance an agenda that furthers actions that protect the planet’s
climate. “Social rewards are really powerful in the climate change
battle, especially for young people,” Duhaime says. Recognizing
the mismatch between how the brain processes reward and the novel
challenges of the climate crisis may help people persist when it
feels frustrating and ineffective compared to causes with more
immediately visible effects. Even if you don’t see climate
improvements or policy changes right away, she says, “that won’t
diminish the importance of engaging in these efforts.”<br>
<br>
<b>Strength from unity</b><br>
That theme resonates with Julia Malits, a fifth-year MD candidate
at HMS and a graduate of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health. Malits says that like many of her peers, she grew up with
a certain amount of climate anxiety, which she attributes to being
overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and the immense effort
required to address it. But Malits adds that she wasn’t overly
burdened by her emotions. “I’m an optimist by nature and feel that
society does have the capacity to make needed changes,” she says.
“And what also helps me avoid climate anxiety on a daily basis is
the community that I’ve been lucky enough to connect with here at
Harvard. It helps to surround yourself with people who are
similarly worried about these issues and are also engaging with
you on solutions, in whatever capacity is meaningful to you.”<br>
<br>
Malits says her interest in the health effects of climate change
blossomed during conversations with professors and other HMS
students. She became a student ambassador with the Harvard Chan
Center for Climate, Health, and Global Environment (C-CHANGE),
which has a mission to deliver solutions-based research that
shapes climate actions — especially those that improve health for
vulnerable populations.<br>
<br>
In January, following a presentation delivered by Gaurab Basu, an
HMS instructor and primary care physician with Cambridge Health
Alliance, and jointly developed by Malits, Madeline Kline, a
student in the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program, and HMS students in an
environment and medicine interest group, the HMS Educational
Policy and Curriculum Committee voted to officially incorporate
climate change and health into the MD curriculum as a priority
societal theme. The curricular change builds on the pioneering
work of students, faculty, and alumni, such as Eric Chivian, MD
’68, who founded and directed the HMS-based center that is now
C-CHANGE, and Aaron Bernstein, an HMS assistant professor of
pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and former interim
director of C-CHANGE.<br>
<br>
Thanks to their efforts, climate themes will now be integrated
into existing courses across all four years of the MD program and
cover topics such as how climate change affects human health, how
health care systems contribute to the problem, and how physicians
can help in the move toward solutions.<br>
<br>
“Climate anxiety is an important catalyst for the work I do,”
Malits says. “I think you need avenues to channel it and talk
about it with loved ones and peers, and have communities through
which you can process those feelings and come up with remedies.”
Collaborative activism dampens the anxiety, Malits says, and gives
young people a sense of renewed hope for the future. “That’s why
it’s important to roll up your sleeves and think about how you’d
like to tackle the problem,” she says.<br>
<br>
But Malits says she worries most about how climate change is
affecting marginalized communities, singling out those who live in
urban heat islands, where inadequate green space intensifies
extreme heat. While it’s true that extreme weather events are
occurring with mounting frequency in wealthier nations, many
countries in the developing world continue to bear the brunt of
the climate problem.<br>
<br>
<b>The problem at our doorstep</b><br>
Indeed, the countries suffering most from climate change now are
also the least able to respond to its psychological effects. In
Somalia — which is one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan
Africa — climate change is fueling the worst drought in decades
and putting 8 million people, nearly half the population, at risk
for famine. Catastrophic floods linked to climate change in
Pakistan recently affected more than 33 million people living in
the area. In addition, according to 2019 data from the World Bank,
nearly 30 percent of Honduras’s population works for the
agricultural sector, where rising temperatures and drought are
contributing to a mass exodus, as documented that year by PBS
NewsHour.<br>
<br>
Researchers are finding that young people with the most extreme
fears over climate change live predominantly in the developing
world. The Philippines and India, for instance, are near the top
of a list of recently surveyed countries where young people report
climate-driven feelings that “humanity is doomed” and “the future
is frightening.”<br>
<br>
Mental health systems in the developing world need more resources
to deal with this growing crisis, cautions Caleb Dresser, an
emergency medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center and a fellow at Harvard Chan School’s C-CHANGE. Disasters
linked with climate change can create huge mental health needs,
Dresser says, “and while many good programs and organizations step
in to help, the need for services easily outpaces resources both
during and after the disaster occurs.” Nearly a year after
Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, 18 percent of
children living in the area were still struggling with PTSD-like
symptoms, and nearly 30 percent of those who lived through
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 wound up with complicated grief, in
which strong feelings of loss linger for a long time.<br>
<br>
Dresser leads research focused on the health implications of
climate change, especially in terms of its effects on emergency
care and operations during extreme weather events. In 2017, he
cared for people who had left Puerto Rico for Boston after
Hurricane Maria decimated the island. Many were suffering
emotional trauma as a result of both the storm and having been
uprooted from their communities.<br>
<br>
“We know from other displacement events in history that seeking
life in a new location is extraordinarily stressful and comes with
long-term risks of anxiety and depression related to a loss of
place and a change in one’s sense of self,” Dresser says.<br>
<br>
Emergency responders need to be ready for the forced migration of
people affected by climate change, Dresser says, adding that many
could benefit from access to care for mental health problems.<br>
<br>
Even when people are not uprooted by disaster, a variety of
climate-related mechanisms can affect their mental health or the
safety of their mental health treatment. High heat and humidity
worsen irritability and cognition, he points out, and they can
also exacerbate side effects from some common psychiatric
medications. Levels of lithium — a mood stabilizer used for
treating bipolar disorder and major depression — can rise to
potentially toxic concentrations in a person who is perspiring
heavily; they can become dehydrated and may develop impaired
kidney funtion, potentially causing tremor, slurred speech,
confusion and other dangerous effects. In addition,
serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, and
benzodiazepines may affect the body’s physiological response to
heat with varied effects on blood pressure, sweating, and
cognition. Patients with chronic mental health issues are at
increased risk during hot weather and more likely to need
emergency care. In extreme cases, heatstroke can occur, with
potentially fatal results.<br>
<br>
Pinsky points out that even as the effects of climate change on
pediatric mental health are increasingly recognized, research in
the field is in its early stages. She was an author on a 2022
Academic Psychiatry paper investigating the perspectives of more
than a dozen scientists who work in this area. They identified
several pending needs, including additional interventions to
support and foster the resilience of young people experiencing
climate anxiety, more funding, and the removal of logistical
barriers that block access to care for affected individuals.
Resistance from colleagues in the field was also raised as an
issue. Pinsky and others stress that efforts aimed at responding
to the mental health challenges of climate change must engage with
broader work aimed at removing the root cause of the problem: our
reliance on fossil fuels.<br>
<br>
Pinsky now works with several organizations to raise awareness of
climate change, including the Mass General Center for the
Environment and Health and the new Youth Working Group of the
Climate Psychiatry Alliance, which had its launch meeting in April
2023. And like others on the front lines of the climate change
battle, she has her hands full as the pace of warming only
accelerates.<br>
<br>
According to the latest report from the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released on March 20,
it is likely that without swift action, the world will exceed a
global average temperature increase of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit
above preindustrial levels by 2030. Beyond that threshold, the
panel warned, heat waves, crop failures, the spread of infectious
diseases, floods, and species extinctions could outstrip
humanity’s capacity to adapt. Warming will cease only if humans
stop adding heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.<br>
<br>
“I believe the fundamental and best treatment for youth climate
distress is a rapid and just transition from fossil fuels,” Pinsky
says. “I genuinely consider all that work to be in the area of
mitigating climate anxiety.” <br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety">https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/climate-anxiety</a><br>
</font>
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<i> </i><i><font face="Calibri"> [ Could this be related to the
beached whale news ?? ]</font></i><br>
<b>'Very Bad News Indeed': Study Sounds Alarm on Threat of Deep
Ocean Current Collapse</b><br>
"It's something that is a concern because it touches on so many
aspects of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine
life," said one oceanographer.<br>
BRETT WILKINS<br>
May 25, 2023<br>
Antarctic currents that enrich 40% of Earth's deep ocean with oxygen
and nutrients that are vital for marine life have slowed dangerously
in recent decades and could collapse by mid-century, a study
published Thursday revealed.<br>
<br>
The research—which was published in the journal Nature Climate
Change—showed that a 30% slowdown in deep water currents around
Antarctica since the early 1990s.<br>
<br>
Currents known as Antarctic bottom waters—which are driven by cold,
dense waters off the Antarctic continental shelf—power a worldwide
system of currents. The most important of these, known as the
Southern Ocean overturning circulation, comprises two massive
cells—one subducting downward and the other upwelling—that connect
the various water basins in a global circulation system...<br>
- -<br>
"If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them," Matt England
of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South
Wales in Australia, a co-author of the new paper, said in a
statement.<br>
<br>
"Our modeling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the
current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than
40% in the next 30 years—and on a trajectory that looks headed
towards collapse," England added...<br>
- -<br>
Steve Rintoul, co-author of the study and oceanographer at the
Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation, toldThe Guardian that "changes in the
overturning circulation are a big deal."<br>
<br>
"It's something that is a concern because it touches on so many
aspects of the Earth, including climate, sea level, and marine
life," he added.<br>
<br>
England and Rintoul were part of a team of researchers who in March
published a study in Nature that found the vital deep ocean current
is "on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse" over the
coming decades...<br>
- -<br>
Scientists from Australia examined the deep ocean current below
approximately 13,000 feet that originates in the cold, dense waters
off the continental shelf of Antarctica and flows to ocean basins
across the planet.<br>
<br>
"The model projections of rapid change in the deep ocean circulation
in response to melting of Antarctic ice might, if anything, have
been conservative," Rintoul said Thursday. "We're seeing changes
have already happened in the ocean that were not projected to happen
until a few decades from now."<br>
<br>
England toldThe Guardian in March that "in the past, these
circulations have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but
this is happening over just a few decades."<br>
<br>
"It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow
down," he added. "We are talking about the possible long-term
extinction of an iconic water mass."..<br>
- -<br>
The new research comes after the European Union's Copernicus Climate
Change Service reported in February that its analysis of satellite
imagery showed Antarctic sea ice coverage was 31% below average the
previous month, significantly lower than the previous January low
mark set in 2017.<br>
<br>
In January, a 600-square-mile iceberg nearly the size of Greater
London broke off Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf, although scientists
said the event will affect—but was not caused by—climate change.
January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/deep-ocean-current">https://www.commondreams.org/news/deep-ocean-current</a><br>
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<i>[ it is difficult to produce comedy shows for global warming -
keep trying ]</i><br>
<b>CU Boulder Inside the Greenhouse & Nowhere Comedy Los
Angeles, CA 'Comedy to Save the Climate' show</b><br>
Climate Comedy<br>
May 26, 2023<br>
This show closed out our 2023 climate comedy season with a show May
7.<br>
<br>
This is a partnership with LA-based Ben Gleib who runs the 'Nowhere
Comedy Club' <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://nowherecomedyclub.com/">https://nowherecomedyclub.com/</a><br>
<br>
"When COVID-19 hit, every comedian lost their ability to tour and
live entertainment shut down. Nowhere Comedy Club is a way around
all that - a full comedy club experience from the comfort of your
home! (Assuming your home is comfortable). Watch your favorite
performers in a more intimate setting, but with the live laughter
and excitement of a night out. And since there's no travel costs,
tickets are more affordable to fans! We hope you enjoy the world's
first digital comedy club. Welcome to Nowhere!"<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ebn4d6qr4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ebn4d6qr4</a>
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<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Training for the information battles to
come ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake
Journalism in American History (Prof. Andie Tucher)</b><br>
</font><font face="Calibri">NCAS Video</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Oct 13, 2022<br>
Fake news has marked American journalism since "Publick
Occurrences" hit the streets of Boston in 1690, but an even
greater danger is posed by the more recent phenomenon of fake
journalism: the exploitation of the outward forms of
professionalized journalism in order to lend credibility to
falsehood, propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy. As the media
have grown ever more massive and ever more deeply entwined in the
political system, so has fake journalism, to the point where it
has become an essential driver of the political polarization of
public life. What happens to democracy when fake journalism looks
more and more like truth, and fake truth like journalism?<br>
<br>
Professor Andie Tucher, the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the
director of the Communications PhD Program at the Columbia
Journalism School, writes widely on the evolution of conventions
of truth-telling in journalism, photography, personal narrative,
and other nonfiction forms. Her most recent book is "Not Exactly
Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History" (2022).
She previously worked in documentary production at ABC News and
Public Affairs Television, and holds a Ph.D. in American
Civilization from New York University. <br>
Views expressed in this video are those of the speaker and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the National Capital Area
Skeptics.<br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-7ZgLXX9U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-7ZgLXX9U</a><br>
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<font face="Calibri"><i>[ climate crimes ]</i><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><b>A series by CCNow and the Guardian
investigates Big Oil's complicity in the climate crisis and
examines attempts to hold the fossil-fuel industry accountable.</b><br>
As the impacts of the climate crisis multiply across the US, from
intensified drought and wildfires in the west to stronger
hurricanes in the east, a question is echoing ever louder: who
should be held responsible?<br>
<br>
According to an unprecedented number of lawsuits filed by US
cities and states that are currently making their way through the
court system, the answer is fossil fuel companies.<br>
<br>
“Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene…The crime
in question is the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years of lying about
climate change,” writes Covering Climate Now’s executive director
Mark Hertsgaard in a Guardian article that kicked off the series.<br>
<br>
The lawsuits marshal a sweeping array of well-established facts
that detail how for decades, major petroleum corporations knew
that burning fossil fuels wreaked havoc on the environment.<br>
<br>
Industry elites heard dire warnings from their own scientists who
predicted the urgency of the climate crisis nearly 60 years ago.
But instead of taking swift action, the oil conglomerates staged a
coordinated disinformation campaign to suppress political action
and public awareness around the growing scientific consensus
pointing to a climate emergency.<br>
<br>
To help raise awareness around the climate crisis and the role of
fossil fuel companies, the Guardian’s series, Climate Crimes,
launched in collaboration with Covering Climate Now, examines
these attempts to hold the industry accountable and investigate
the tactics used by the companies to elide their own role in
global heating. It also interrogates the central question that
emerges from these lawsuits: Is the climate crisis in fact a crime
scene?<br>
<br>
Much of the content produced for the series is available for CCNow
partner news outlets to publish. Below you’ll find the stories
published in the series. <br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://coveringclimatenow.org/">https://coveringclimatenow.org/</a><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://coveringclimatenow.org/projects/climate-crimes/">https://coveringclimatenow.org/projects/climate-crimes/</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Last year's study from renowned climate
scientists deserves return review - this has plain language ]</i><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><b>Climate Endgame: Exploring
catastrophic climate change scenarios</b><br>
Luke Kemp <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7447-4335">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7447-4335</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ltk27@cam.ac.uk">ltk27@cam.ac.uk</a>,
Chi Xu <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1841-9032">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1841-9032</a>, Joanna Depledge, +7,
and Timothy M. Lenton <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-7498Authors">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-7498Authors</a>
Info & Affiliations<br>
Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA; received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022<br>
August 1, 2022<br>
119 (34) e2108146119<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119">https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119</a></font>
<blockquote><font face="Calibri"><b>Abstract</b><br>
Prudent risk management requires consideration of
bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such
potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic
climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even
eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously
underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that
climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing
the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help
galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy,
including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge
about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why
understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons
for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and
put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four
main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to
drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that
could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are
human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk
cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and
systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of
evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully
synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is
time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge
of better understanding catastrophic climate change.<br>
</font></blockquote>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119">https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Calibri"><br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - looking back]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>May 27, 2008</b></i></font> <br>
May 27, 2008: The New York Times reports: <br>
<br>
"The Rockefeller family built one of the great American fortunes
by supplying the nation with oil. Now history has come full
circle: some family members say it is time to start moving beyond
the oil age."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/27exxon.html</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri">======================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
class="moz-txt-tag">*Mass media is lacking, many </span>daily
summaries<span class="moz-txt-tag"> deliver global warming
news - a few are email delivered*</span></b> <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><br>
=========================================================<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>*Inside Climate News</b><br>
Newsletters<br>
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every
day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s
top headlines deliver the full story, for free.<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/">https://insideclimatenews.org/</a><br>
--------------------------------------- <br>
*<b>Climate Nexus</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
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more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
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