environment Politics: economics indigenous peoples Native Americans sustainability tribal societies
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 3: Ring-A-Ding-Ding!
More on the indigenous cultures story, this time from the Carroll County Times:
The severe weather extremes of recent years has many more people considering climate change and our impact on the planet, but a Senate committee last week heard from a group that is directly impacted, and what they had to say should be heard by everyone who claims climate change isn’t real.
Members of several West Coast tribes and Alaska communities were in Washington last week for a symposium on the impact of climate change.
The Associated Press reported that during a committee hearing, Hawaii Senator and committee chairman Daniel Akaka said that native communities are disproportionately impacted because they depend on nature for traditional food, sacred sites and for cultural ceremonies.
Villages are being wiped out by coastal erosion. According to the Associated Press, Mike Williams, chief of the Yupit Nation in Akiak, Alaska, to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee how the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race had to be moved because of a lack of snowfall, and how it had become necessary for the dogs to run at night to stay cool.
“We’ve always lived off the land and off the waters and continue to do that. But we’re bearing the burden of living with these conditions today,” The Associated Press reported Williams telling the committee.
Talking to a Senate committee is going to do them a hell of a lot of good, I’m sure. Sent July 23:
Indigenous peoples around the world are invariably on the front lines of climate change. Because their lives are integrated with the cyclic flow of seasons and the gradual transformations of ecosystems over time, they are uniquely situated to read warning signals most of us wouldn’t even recognize.
But we should not be deluded into believing that global warming is only going to affect tribal populations. With Midwestern agriculture under significant threat from devastating heat waves, Americans can anticipate climbing grocery bills and the likelihood of shortages in the months to come. Nobody’s going to be able to evade the impact of industrial civilization’s CO2 spree much longer, even with the help of petroleum-funded professional denialists in the print and broadcast media.
Traditional societies may hear the alarms sooner and louder than the rest of us, but there can be no doubt: the bells are tolling for us all.
Warren Senders
environment: glacial melt media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 8, Day 2: “…the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
The Kansas City Star runs a McClatchy intern’s story on climate change’s effects on a place nobody will ever visit:
AYALOMA, Ecuador — Frosts aren’t on time for the 960 people living in this tiny, remote village, hidden on a chilly, windswept mountain ridge in South America.
A minor problem? Maybe for some. But in the Andean community, 8,800 feet above sea level, frosts – and their impact on crop cycles – are kind of a big deal.
In this agricultural community, crops are planted during the full moon, a tradition meant to help ensure a full harvest. But these days, the harvests aren’t as full.
Village residents say it’s the mark of climate change descending upon the Ayaloman people.
“In Ecuador, we’ve really experienced a sudden change in our climate,” said Ana Loja, a professor at the University of Cuenca, in the Andes of southern Ecuador. “We cannot say, ‘Maybe this is not happening,’ but I think everyone is aware it is a real problem.”
It’s always the Other what feels the blow. Sent July 22:
A strong human-interest element is essential to good reporting, and Annika McGinnis’ report on climate change’s impact on a tiny village in Central America is a wonderful example. The story of how these tough mountain people are coping with a radically changing world makes for compelling reading.
But that’s not all there is to news. Ms. McGinnis’ article needs to make the connection to the lives of readers in the United States. For too long, climate change has been the problem of an unspecified “other”, only affecting people and nations far from our own. As Midwest heatwaves and Colorado wildfires make clear, the impact of the burgeoning greenhouse effect is not the exclusive province of the Third World; the climatic consequences of a century-long carbon binge are no respecters of national boundaries. The industrialized West will soon have more in common with Ayaloma’s residents than we can presently imagine.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility fossil fuels sustainability
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 5: Right Time, Wrong Place?
We need more like this (from the Washington Post):
LONDON — Four climate change activists scaled gates at Queen Elizabeth II’s Buckingham Palace home on Saturday and locked themselves to railings in a protest demanding more urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The group, from the Climate Siren environmentalist movement, wore T-shirts with the slogan “Climate emergency. 10 percent annual emission cuts” and chanted through a loud hailer.
London’s Metropolitan Police said the four had climbed up a gate at the front of the palace and secured themselves to it, sitting with their legs through the railings.
The protesters unfurled a banner quoting a 2008 speech by Prince Charles, the queen’s son and heir, warning over a lack of progress on tacking climate change. It read: “’The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight.”
This letter was an easy one to write. Sent June 24:
It’s easy to share the anger and urgency of the British environmentalists who recently locked themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. After all, the grim scientific news on climate change is depressingly complemented by the systemic paralysis of our political system when it comes to tackling the most crucial issue of our time.
But those four activists are directing their intensity at the wrong palace. While British royalty offers a telegenic backdrop, they’re not the real villains of the climate crisis. That role is reserved for the giant multinational corporations currently fighting tooth and nail to guard their exorbitant profits against meaningful climate and environment policies. They are the drug dealers to the world, misrepresenting their product as “cheap” and “harmless” when it is neither. The corporate headquarters and boardrooms of these oligarchs are more appropriate targets for the outrage of those justifiably concerned about our threatened planet.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture National Research Council rising sea levels sustainability Water
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 4: Stop Me Before I Strike Again!
California’s gonna get a soaker sometime soon (SF Chronicle):
Global sea-level rise, induced by the warming climate, will hit California’s coastline harder than the other West Coast states over the coming decades and on through the end of the century, according to a new report from the National Research Council.
Oceans around the world are rising, but seas around California will rise even higher – by more than 3 feet before 2100, the report says. Tide gauges and satellites show that the rate of sea-level rise has increased steadily since 1900, and with each passing decade, storm surges and high waves will put low-lying regions like the Bay Area at heightened risk of dangerous flooding.
The forecasts come from the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which appointed the 12-member committee to investigate earlier estimates of sea-level rise and factor in all new available evidence. The result was a 260-page report issued Friday.
The report was commissioned primarily by California’s Department of Water Resources, along with state agencies from Oregon and Washington in order to aid their planning efforts.
Another job-killing bureaucracy to kill! Sent June 23:
The next few decades are going to be ones of drastic transition for many Americans. Insulated by our wealth and elaborate consumer lifestyle, we have lost sight of the fact that ultimately our lives entirely depend on our increasingly tenuous control of water.
Now, as rising oceans transform our coastlines, inland states anticipate water shortages. Even as our vulnerable aquifers are overused by an expanding population, climate change makes weather more unpredictable and droughts more extreme. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to see that this future isn’t going to be kind to us, despite the glib pronouncements of denialists in politics and the media.
In a sensible world, the National Research Council’s report on global sea-level rise would be a wake-up call for all of us, everywhere. Since our world is anything but sensible, what are the odds that the next Republican “jobs” bill will also eliminate funding for the NRC?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility hunger sustainability
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 2: The Hunger Games?
USA Today’s Wendy Koch:
As leaders from more than 130 nations convene a United Nations conference on sustainable development Wednesday, new research shows how climate change will likely exacerbate a key issue: hunger.
The number of undernourished women and young children could increase 20% and affect one of every five within a decade because of climate change’s impact on food production, according to an analysis by the World Health Organization and other groups. Today, one in seven or 495 million women and children under age 5 lack sufficient food, the report says, adding population growth will worsen the problem.
Eventually they’re going to eat the rich. Sent on June 21:
The connections are obvious: more unpredictable weather means fewer predictable crops, which means more hunger, privation and misery. A mother facing a catastrophic crop failure can ill afford the luxury of pretending that the planetary greenhouse effect is a conspiracy ginned up by a liberal cabal. An undernourished child cannot silence hunger pangs with out-of-context statistics.
Furthermore, the humanitarian consequences of climate change are only part of the picture. Starvation has its own devastating geopolitical impacts, and any robust environmental policy must address them before they threaten global security. Our political paralysis in the face of this threat demonstrates once again that climate-change denial is the exclusive prerogative of the economically protected. If the wealthy power-brokers in corporate boardrooms and the halls of Congress could abandon their gourmet lunches and finally face a hungry, thirsty, malnourished world, perhaps they’d stop blocking progress towards a meaningful global agreement on climate.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cities sustainability urban planning
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 1: The Old Gray Mayor Just Ain’t What He Used To Be
Michael Bloomberg wants you to know that he’s on the case:
Again and again, Bloomberg stressed the contrast between the paralysis of national governments and the agility of municipal authorities, which he said were up to meeting the social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.
“We don’t have the luxury of just sitting back and talking about the problems because on a whole range of critical action, the buck stops at city hall,’’ said Bloomberg, adding that cities are key players in the fight against global warming because about 75 percent of global emissions take place within city limits.
“We aren’t arguing with each other over reduction targets, we’re making progress individually and collectively to improve our cities and the planet,’’ he told journalists on a conference call ahead of Tuesday’s event. He added that two-thirds of the C40 initiatives to combat climate change were financed solely out of municipal budgets, with no funds from national governments.
Some of the projects already under way include Paris’ rental bike and electric car programs, Bogota’s electric taxis, Los Angeles’ use of more efficient bulbs LED in its street lights, and the improved solid waste collection initiatives by New Delhi, Lagos and Mexico City.
Good for them. How about some large-scale support? Sent June 20:
Given that well over three-quarters of Americans (and over half the world’s population) live in cities, sustainable urban design is an idea whose time has clearly come. The fight against climate change requires us to feed and shelter the world’s steadily-increasing population while simultaneously significantly reducing greenhouse emissions — an impossible task without the economies of scale and increased efficiency cities provide.
But a climate-changed world poses enormous challenges to urban planners. Extreme weather will stress infrastructure to the breaking point, our already-vulnerable agricultural systems will be hard-pressed to feed millions of people, and unlimited fresh water is no longer something any of us can take for granted.
Cities around the world will play a crucial role in our struggle against the burgeoning greenhouse effect — but they must be supported with robust environmental and energy policy initiatives at all levels of governance from local to international.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes economics idiots sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 29: There’s A Reason I Don’t Buy Those Shitty Chisels At The Borg
Sigh. The Marysville, CA Appeal-Democrat offers us a confirmation of the old saw: another day, another dullard.
Enjoy:
Real life is foiling climate alarmists’ schemes to transform the world into a green Utopia. About 130 world leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this week to establish more rules, regulations and transfers of wealth, ostensibly to eradicate poverty and protect the environment.
This is yet another U.N. attempt to advance its war against what first was demonized as “global warming,” then “climate change” — when temperatures flattened out. The movement now frames its mission as “sustainable development.”
Make no mistake, what they hope to sustain is the same tired attempt to move mountains of wealth from nations that create it to nations that don’t, along the way enriching government budgets and lining pockets of facilitators, opportunists and cronies. Think Solyndra.
Changing the real world into an imaginary green holy land has run up against reality. Europe is in economic crisis. Emerging economies in China, Brazil, India and Russia grow more resistant to underwriting costs that would retard their economies.
The conference is a misguided movement directed at an inappropriate demon. If climate zealots got their way, they would retard living conditions, not improve them.
With a 250-word limit, I let myself go a bit. Sent June 18:
Leave aside the question of whether it’s really a pejorative to describe people concerned about the survival of our civilization as “climate alarmists” (everyone agrees that fire alarms are a good thing). Leave aside the fact that the change in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change” was suggested and promulgated by Republican strategist Frank Luntz as a way to make the problem seem less threatening (and only accidentally coinciding more closely with reality).
Let’s look for a moment at your editorial’s outrage at the idea of “sustainability.” Everyone knows: you can’t live beyond your means. Spending more than you make can also be described as “wasting your resources.” Citizens of wealthy nations currently waste more resources than those of poor nations; recognition of this fact is not reflexive anti-capitalism, but a willingness to describe reality clearly.
The common sense underlying our willingness to buy better tools, sturdier clothes, and healthier food even if they’re a bit more expensive (since we save money in the long run) has a name: “sustainability.” With seven billion people on the planet, it’s sensible to figure out ways to stop wasting resources while reducing the sum total of human misery. That’s called “sustainable development.”
While there are undoubtedly “profiteering opportunists” running “sustainability” scams, it’s hard to compare them with the real profiteers: giant oil companies which garner astronomical returns from encouraging all of us to burn their products without regard for the consequences.
Warren Senders
If it’s your birthday today, happy birthday.
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots insurance scientific consensus survival sustainability timescale wildfires
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 19: Double Whammy Bar
Two separate articles in the June 7 issue of the Vancouver Sun:
The Earth’s ecosystems could reach a point of no return resulting in rapid irreversible collapse in as little as 50 years, according to projections by a group of 18 scientists.
Their article in the journal Nature today says that human activities – such as energy use and widespread transformation of the Earth’s surface for habitation and agriculture – are pushing the planet toward a critical threshold for “state shift” not unlike the transition from the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.
Such a shift would create a new nor-mal condition for the entire planet with a new range of temperatures, new ocean levels and widespread species extinctions resulting in an entirely new web of life.
It would not necessarily be a comfortable place for human beings.
“We’ve had a good long run of really benign conditions that have allowed humans to go from cracking rocks together to walking on the moon,” said Simon Fraser University biodiversity professor Arne Mooers, one of the authors of the article.
The number of major forest fires in B.C. will likely increase by 50 per cent or more in the next 40 years according to a recent report on climate change.
Telling the Weather Story, released this week by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, addresses altering weather patterns across the country in the coming decades and urges Canadians to adjust to the realities of climate change.
The study predicts B.C. can expect an increase in wildfires over the average of nearly 2,000 blazes a year between 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, the province will likely see a host of other weather-related issues like warmer temperatures, declining — and, in some regions, disappearing — mountain snowpacks, more intense rainfall during the winter, and drier summers. The number of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes — responsible for nearly 60 per cent of fires — is also expected to rise.
“It’s not a just a possibility,” said Dr. Gordon McBean, the report’s lead researcher. “There’s a very real probability it will happen.”
McBean, a climatologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the research with cooperation from the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, where he also serves as policy chairman.
Read the comments for the full flavor. Sheesh. Sent June 8:
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s report on the increased risk of forest fires is a localized version of the dire planetary “tipping point” projections just published in the journal Nature. The two articles in the June 7 edition of the Sun reinforce one another in the same way that climate-change processes do. For example, hotter summers set the stage for more forest fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop; the pine-beetle infestations brought by milder winters can leave whole forests of flammable dead trees — which, naturally, cannot reabsorb carbon as healthy forests do. Thawing Arctic permafrost releases even more carbon, while melting polar ice means less light is reflected back into space, in turn leading to greater heat absorption by the oceans.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms of denial are very strong, and many people will ignore this obvious crisis rather than contemplate changing their convenient lifestyles.
Humanity is a tenacious, flexible and adaptable species. We can survive the consequences of global climate change — but only if we stop denying the existence of the emergency, instead bringing all of our resources, ingenuity and commitment to bear on the problem.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: apocalypse biodiversity denialists extinction sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 18: Oh, Not HIM Again!
More on the Barnosky study, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Barnosky, who tracks longtime changes in the fossil record, and 22 other scientists spent two years in conferences and research to produce their review. It is timed for a U.N. conference on sustainable development – known as the Rio+20 Conference – that is scheduled for Rio de Janeiro from June 22 to 24. The conference will mark 20 years since the first “Earth Summit” at Rio, involving delegates from 172 governments, produced the first international conventions on climate change and biodiversity.
In their report in Nature, the scientists say their research shows many combined factors are thrusting the world toward the tipping point they foresee. Among the problems are these:
— The rapid growth in the world’s human population – to 9 billion or more by 2050 and possibly 27 billion by the end of the century – is quickly consuming available resources.
Fossil fuels are being burned at a rapidly increasing rate, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 35 percent since the industrial revolution began. At the same time, ocean acidity has risen by 5 percent in the past 20 years.
— Ocean productivity is being diminished by vast “dead zones” where no fish swim, while 40 percent of Earth’s land mass that was once “biodiverse” now contains far fewer species of crop plants and domestic animals.
— More animal species than ever are becoming extinct, and many plant and animal species are being forced by global warming to seek new ranges that could place them at risk of extinction, as well.
— Within the next 60 years, the average global temperature “will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.”
And look who got the call to be the voice of doubt! Sent June 7:
While the doctrine of false equivalency demands that a nominal “skeptic” be represented in any discussion of the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences for humanity, it’s a measure of climate-change deniers’ desperation that the only climate scientist still available for this role is Dr. Richard Lindzen.
When asked to comment on the study led by Dr. Anthony Barnosky which assembles an impressive (and genuinely terrifying) array of evidence for an imminent climatic “tipping point,” Lindzen remarks that “no one thinks anything terrible will happen in anything like the future they see.” Of course, the report’s 23 co-authors might beg to differ. If Lindzen mistakes twenty-three scientists for “no one,” what does this say about his statistical acumen?
Oh, yes: while it’s irrelevant to the climate debate, it’s nevertheless noteworthy that Dr. Lindzen continues to dispute the statistical validity of another important scientific consensus — the one linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer.
Warren Senders
environment: ecologies oceanic acidification oceans rising sea levels sustainability timescale
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 15: …But The Words Aren’t Clear….
Bud Ris, the CEO of the New England Aquarium, has a perspective on the oceans’ message to us that’s definitely worth a read:
As we celebrate World Oceans Day on Friday, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the current state of our oceans and the biggest challenge they face: climate change. This is no longer a problem for the future; climate change is already underway.
We now know, for example, that the heat content of the upper layer of the oceans is on the rise. Just a degree or two of change can make a big difference.
As oceans warm, the water actually expands and takes up more space. This is a basic physics phenomenon called thermal expansion. This means that as water temperatures rise, sea level will rise as well, as it has in Boston by about 11 inches over the last 100 years. (Land subsidence is also a factor)
RelatedMore from The Podium
The data now show that the pace of sea level rise is clearly accelerating, meaning that one to two feet of additional sea level rise by the end of the century is now likely. Much more is possible if ice atop the land masses in Greenland and Antarctica also melts. This has major implications for buildings and public infrastructure along Boston’s waterfront and other major cities. The risks of flooding during storm surges will increase.
Ocean warming won’t just affect humans. The geographic distribution, feeding patterns, and reproductive cycles of many marine animals are sensitive to temperature changes of just a few degrees and to changes in salinity and pH, caused by more freshwater runoff and increased carbon absorption. That may explain why most of the North Atlantic right whales that migrate annually up and down the East Coast didn’t show up in the Bay of Fundy in 2010 for the first time in 30 years — and why now — two years later — we are seeing the result in emaciated mothers and calves and a precariously low birth rate. It might also help explain why lobsters are molting weeks earlier in Maine, and why lobster populations south of Cape Cod are in decline.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Sent June 5:
It’s increasingly apparent that all our planet’s ecosystems are trying to tell us something. Whether it’s bushes transforming into trees in a warming tundra, forests decimated by invasive insects, or acidifying oceans endangering multiple species of marine life, there’s no doubt that the web of life on Earth is under siege.
Why, then, are we seemingly unable to hear the distress calls of the oceans, the forests, or the tundra? Why do so many deny the rapidly accumulating evidence that climate change is an ongoing catastrophe of epic proportions?
While a selfish resistance to inconvenient truths is certainly part of the answer, it’s also true that industrialized humans have separated themselves from the natural world so completely that its messages might as well be in Etruscan. If we are to survive the climate crisis, we must relearn the languages of ecological interdependence along with the hard facts of sustainability.
Warren Senders