You may have read news this weekend that the Trump Administration buried its new acknowledgement of global warming in a massive transportation policy document. Basically, Trump says, the planet is going to be destroyed soon, so let's poison and party like it is 1984.
Believe it. We've never had a federal government and leadership as reckless as this.
For the generations who are going to struggle with an unimaginable shitstorm coming our way, we must do more.
Our Children's Trust and its youth plaintiffs are doing more; using state and federal law to hold government to account.
8 young Floridians need your support! Join @youthvgov in Tallahassee on October 4 to show your solidarity with youth plaintiffs in the climate lawsuit against the State of Florida. www.facebook.com/events/227994191383110/#youthvgovFL
Eight young Floridians need your support. Join Our Children's Trust in Tallahassee to show your solidarity with #youthvgovFL! Gather at 1 p.m. to welcome the young plaintiffs in Reynolds v. State of Florida, the youth climate lawsuit. Rally outside the courthouse after the hearing to support the youth as they exit and to hear a few words from them and their attorneys. The hearing is open to the public.
In other news, global heatwave continues to smash records:
- Tbilisi: 41°C
- Baku: 43°C
- Yerevan: 42°C
- Iran: 53°C
- Montreal: 37°C
- Ottawa: 47°C
- Denver: 40°C
- Los Angeles: 44°C (111°F) and all of Southern Ca
- Scotland: 33.2°C
It’s a hot new world and getting hotter. Republicans fiddle while the planet is burning. (If you think — as some Republicans do — that we “can’t afford” to address climate change or that government intervention is “unconstitutional”, just wait until the planet is 10% hotter or more, than it is today.)
For Immediate Release:
July 30, 2018
Contacts:
Philip Gregory, 650-278-2957, pgregory@gregorylawgroup.com
To set up interviews with youth plaintiffs, contact: Meg Ward, 503-341-8590, meg@ourchildrenstrust.org
U.S. Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Youth Plaintiffs, Allows Juliana v. United States to Proceed to Trial
Washington, D.C. -- Today, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the 21 youth plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate lawsuit filed against the federal government. The Court denied the Trump administration’s application for stay, preserving the U.S. District Court’s trial start date of October 29, 2018. The Court also denied the government’s “premature” request to review the case before the district court hears all of the facts that support the youth’s claims at trial. The Supreme Court’s decision follows the July 20 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals, also in favor of the youth, denying the government’s highly unusual second petition for writ of mandamus.
The Court stated: “The breadth of [the youth’s] claims is striking” and ordered the District Court to take the federal government’s “concerns into account in assessing the burdens of discovery and trial, as well as the desirability of a prompt ruling on the Government’s pending dispositive motions.” On July 18, 2018, the District Court expressed its intent to issue a ruling on the government’s motions promptly.
Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children’s Trust and co-counsel for youth plaintiffs said:
“This decision should give young people courage and hope that their third branch of government, all the way up to the Supreme Court, has given them the green light to go to trial in this critical case about their unalienable rights. We look forward to presenting the scientific evidence of the harms and dangers these children face as a result of the actions their government has taken to cause the climate crisis.”
Trump Republicans suppress evidence that real, unsafe borders are between alien chemicals and you.
A Republican White House and a Republican Congress don't care that toxic algae is overwhelming the nation's waterways, like in Florida and with Lake Okeechobee, because if they did, they would be doing something about the alien chemicals. They are not.
Sure, Central American M-13 gang members don't belong here, but chances are you will never meet any of them. On the other hand, you are surrounded by alien chemicals and your government is doing next to nothing about those threats to your safety, including cancer.
Some of the alien chemicals have long names like carbon dioxide or methylmercury.
Republicans don't want to talk about alien chemicals they refuse to regulate or enforce against. Your Republicans in state legislatures, the governor's office, or Congress don't acknowledge that the biggest defender of alien chemicals is Trump's EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, the most corrupt Trump White House official.
So much easier to target brown-skinned poor people than wealthy polluters who inhibit Trump from firing Pruitt.
Ever stop to think: the walls between the wealthy who can afford the best cancer care, triggered by alien chemicals, are even higher than the wall with Mexico? In the US you still can't get good, affordable cancer-care outcomes like other parts of the developed world.
Have a look at this chart and think about how hot it has been the past few years. The weather feels different. The seasons, different too. A too-hot-to-live in climate is all about alien chemicals we put in the atmosphere.
What the chart posted on Twitter says: based on scientific evidence, the current average global surface temperature is higher than any time since the dawn of humans. Temperatures are not going to lower because of those alien chemicals that Republicans defend..
Scientific fact: the last time carbon dioxide levels -- man-made through combustion of fossil fuels -- were so high, dinosaurs roamed the earth.
When you vote in November, keep in mind that one political party and its candidates not only refuse to acknowledge alien chemicals, they are actively engaged in accelerating unsafe borders between them and you and your family's health.
Things are getting real, and real fast, in terms of the impacts of pollution on citizens. It's your life. It's your family. It's your world.
Carbon dioxide is a pollutant and largely responsible for global warming. The sunny day flooding that is occurring in low-lying coastal areas will not stop, and it won't stop catastrophic losses to home and business values, until elected leaders start coming to terms with that pollution. If your votes are not for candidates who can honestly say they give a damn about climate change, you are damned.
There are other slow-motion fuses on pollution and toxics that have a direct impact on your life. Your family. Your world.
An oncologist in Brevard County, Dr. Julie Greenwalt, is trying to piece together a toxic puzzle that the government won't. She got cancer, with no history of the disease in her family. She began noticing that lots of her grade and high school classmates, who had all gone to schools near Patrick Air Force Base, also had contracted cancer at a youthful age.
Down here in Miami, there is a lot of money and attention and care placed by the community on cancer in our lives. There are corporate races and drives to raise money for hospitals. There are t-shirts and bracelets. But how many voters understand that cancer is a political event too and not just a matter of bad luck, or genetics?
Cancer is a political event because money needs to be spent, science needs to be gathered, and information needs to be disclosed to help people make informed decisions about toxics in their lives. Even toxics used by government in service of public health and safety.
How could this clearer?
"I just feel grateful to be alive, and I know that God has a plan for my life," Dr. Greenwalt said to a Brevard news outlet. "(Perhaps) this is part of it -- to try and help figure this out."
Voters shouldn't need cancer to raise awareness about government officials, cover-ups on toxics or climate change denialism. Voters shouldn't need algae in a favorite swimming place that is linked to Alzheimer's.
Voters should elect representatives who do more than platitudes or demagogue about how creating "jobs" is more important than protecting your health, your families, and the world we share. First things, first.
Count me among the repulsed and outraged over the Trump and Republican policy of "zero tolerance" at the border, causing more than 2,000 children to be incarcerated by the US government, many forcibly removed from their parents.
According to the NY Times: "A government report released on Thursday said that India was experiencing the worst water crisis in its history, threatening millions of lives and livelihoods. Some 600 million Indians, about half the population, face high to extreme water scarcity conditions, with about 200,000 dying every year from inadequate access to safe water, according to the report. By 2030, it said, the country’s demand for water is likely to be twice the available supply."
Donald Trump and the Republican Party may be in retreat today on family separation, but they haven't even acknowledged the reality of climate change and that is because their campaign funders -- the mostly hidden sources of big, unlimited campaign contributions from the fossil fuel supply chain -- have persuaded THEM that there is nothing we can do about it.
No one should be under the illusion that climate change will exempt the citizens of the United States. From Maine lobstermen, to farmers in the heartland, to owners of property in Miami, ask yourselves this question regarding immigration and refugees: do you trust autocrats like Trump and Rick Scott dictating terms of immigration, refugees, climate change (which they deny) and operating in darkness, insisting we should all just be grateful for how good the news is on Fox?
November 2018, VOTE, because that's the future you will be choosing.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was given a special Vatican service; another dismal detail in the life of privilege that he secured in the Trump administration as a result of his commitment to dismantling the regulatory mission of the federal agency. The Vatican should have kicked him out.
How can one claim to be a Christian, if one is presiding over the dismantling of God's creation? Impossible. It is a fraud, pure and simple.
Jesus Christ -- and the Founders of our nation -- would have known exactly what to do with Trump, Pruitt, Pence and the rest: thrown them from the temple. From our legislatures and governor's mansions.
Yesterday we learned that the President of the United States dictated his health report to his physician. A pundit quipped on Twitter: we'll get to see true medical records at about the same time as we see his tax filings.
For the twitter thread by Alex Steffen: click this link. It is well worth reading ... a friend of mine called the phenomenon of global warming a "delamination" of civilization. It happens slowly. The linkages we depend on for industrial economies are not as durable as they seem. Steffan has another metaphor: "the brittleness bubble".
It is an excellent analogy, because climate change -- slowly, but now with accelerating speed -- is introducing brittleness to the stability and elasticity of predictable seasons and rainfall cycles we require for food production, across the globe. Steffen writes, "There are many vectors for brittleness." He's right, and that's why his analogy captures the impacts of global warming better than "delamination".
For more, read Steffen's thesis on his Twitter thread.
I've been talking about the brittleness bubble for a long time now.
We're starting to see it rupture as extremely vulnerable coastal real estate begins to drop in price.
But here's the thing to remember: There are many vectors of brittleness.
Delaney Reynolds and Alan Farago at first March for Science 2017, Miami
(UPDATE April 17) Juliana v. US is a federal lawsuit brought by children represented by Our Children's Trust: the most important legal challenge against the U.S. government for its affirmative acts causing the crisis through perpetuating the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, despite acute knowledge of the dangers in doing so.
Lawsuits have been filed in state courts too, and the latest is Florida; the state with the most to lose from sea level rise. Delaney Reynolds offers the following:
My name is Delaney Reynolds and I am a college student at the University of Miami's Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Florida and founder of The Sink or Swim Project (miamisearise.com). I split my time between this vibrant, cosmopolitan area of nearly three million people and my second home on No Name Key, a 1,000 acre island filled with nature and 43 solar powered homes in the Florida Keys.
First thing tomorrow, Monday April 16th, 2018, I will be filing a lawsuit against the State of Florida, Governor Rick Scott, and members of his cabinet to demand that they and our State take action to protect us, future generations, and our natural environment from carbon dioxide emissions that have created our climate change crisis.
I am proudly joined in this effort by a diverse group of youth from all over the State of Florida who share my concerns related to our climate change crisis including whether South Florida will even exist in a future confronted by sea level rise.
On Tuesday April 17th at 3:00 PM in Downtown Miami at the Miami-Dade County courthouse steps, I will be conducting a press conference along with my attorneys from Our Children's Trust and the other Florida children who are joining me as Plaintiffs in this case.
I am writing today to not only advise you of what is about to happen but to ask you to consider promoting it to your networks and to help me get as many people as possible to attend the event on Tuesday afternoon here in Miami. The press conference will include comments from some of the children, myself included, as well as some of our attorneys.
... As you might know, Our Children's Trust is active in suing a few other states, as well as our federal government and in that case, the federal case, it is set to go to trial in late October of this year. As you likely also know, the Colombian Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of a group of children who had sued that country seeking that it protect the Amazon and climate in what is a historic case similar to the one that we are undertaking. As you have heard me say before, it is my belief that our planet's climate change crisis is the biggest challenge that my generation will ever face and thus, I feel that today's youth must take action to demand solutions despite the fact that the adults before us have overlooked or caused this problem.
Once again, thank you!
--
Delaney Reynolds
Founder & Activist
The Sink or Swim Project
www.miamisearise.com
www.delaneyreynolds.com
You are going to be hearing a lot more about the federal and state lawsuits radiating around the plaintiffs' lawsuit.
"... the 21 young plaintiffs assert that the U.S. government, through its affirmative actions in creating a national energy system that cause climate change, has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and has failed to protect essential public trust resources. The case is one of many related legal actions brought by youth in several states and countries, all supported by Our Children’s Trust, and all seeking science-based action by governments to stabilize the climate system."
Meanwhile, the kids are doing something about it. In Florida, you'll be hearing a lot more about Juliana, very soon.
For Immediate Release: April 12, 2018
Contacts:
Julia Olson, 415-786-4825, julia@ourchildrenstrust.org
Philip Gregory, 650-278-2957, pgregory@gregorylawgroup.com
JULIANA V. UNITED STATES CLIMATE TRIAL SET FOR OCTOBER 29, 2018
Eugene, Oregon -- During a public case management conference today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin set October 29, 2018 as the trial date for Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate lawsuit brought by 21 young people and supported by Our Children’s Trust. The trial will be heard before U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon.
Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children’s Trust and co-lead counsel for youth plaintiffs said:
“We have our trial date. In the coming months there will be depositions of the parties, defendants’ disclosure of their experts, and expert depositions in late summer. We will build a full factual record for trial so that the Court can make the best informed decision in this crucial constitutional case.”
DOJ attorneys representing the Trump administration told Judge Coffin that the trial date he set “won’t work” for defendants. They claimed they needed additional time to address expert witness reports and find rebuttal experts for every one of plaintiffs’ experts, to which Judge Coffin asked: “Where am I missing something? Given your admissions in this case, what is it about the science that you intend to contest with your rebuttal witnesses?”
The Court also made it clear that it is not going to make decisions on summary judgment motions before the full record at trial, despite defendants’ intentions to move to summary judgment prior to October 29.
Donald Trump, the president of the United States, fundamentally disrespects the executive authority of the White House except for the narrow range of interests that consume his ego.
Holes in staffing and appointments of incompetents delineate vast areas of federal policy and programs where Trump literally has no patience or curiosity. This suits Republican donors from regulated industries to a T. They never had a better opportunity to lock down their prerogatives, and the place this is happening most radically, most efficiently, and most harmfully to the public is in the agency that consumes less than half of one percent of the federal budget: the US EPA. The EPA is the single federal agency where a Trump appointment is expertly matched to the tasks of destruction from within.
EPA Pruitt is angling to be next US Attorney General when Trump fires Jeff Sessions
The minuscule size of the EPA is sharply contrasts with its importance to protecting the air, water, and economy from the impacts of global warming. But the same value to people makes the EPA an anathema to polluting corporations who, as a consequence of regulation, are the largest contributors to political campaigns -- primarily through unregulated dark money channels. (cf. Jane Mayer, "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right".)
For polluting corporations, it is far, far easier to increase quarterly or yearly profits by knocking down regulations on existing profit centers than it is to innovate new markets. When a regulation is killed, or regulators harnessed behind their desks, corporate profits instantly inflate -- as do compensation packages based on improved profit performance.
That is exactly what motivates EPA chief Scott Pruitt.
The delivery of the talking points comes a week after Pruitt announced plans to restrict the agency’s use of science in writing environmental rules, barring the use of research unless the raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry to scrutinize. That directive would disqualify huge amounts of public health research conducted on the condition that subjects’ personal information will remain private. Two former top EPA officials called the move an “attack on science” in a New York Times op-ed published Monday. Last year, the EPA reassigned the four staffers in the policy office who worked on climate adaptation, shuttered its program on climate adaptation and proposed eliminating funding for programs that deal with rising seas and warming temperatures.
Pruitt personally oversaw efforts to scrub climate change from EPA websites, and staunchly defended President Donald Trump’s decision last June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. In October, Pruitt proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, one of the only major federal policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"For the past three decades", Huffington Post notes, "a Big Tobacco-style misinformation campaign funded primarily by oil, gas and coal interests has fueled political debate over the integrity of the scientific consensus."
Unsurprisingly, also, environmental and civic groups have launched a campaign to #bootPruitt.
Embedded in Trump's favor for Pruitt is more than an affinity for brushing off critics like lint from a lapel: Pruitt is exactly the destroyer favored by the Federalist Society and conservative think tank funders like the billionaire Kochs and Mercer families. They use lofty language like "federal overreach" to obscure their real motivation: money. These are Trump's true base, not the narrow sliver of aggrieved white, poorly educated white males.
American voters are passengers on a runaway train whose conductor has jammed the throttle, full speed, so he can retreat to the lounge car reserved for him, family and mistresses, where he eats, tweets and calls the National Enquirer while he watches Fox News and Fox and Friends. Meanwhile, EPA Scott Pruitt has declared an open season on environmental rules and laws, taking a sledge hammer to the agency mission to protect all Americans.
“Climate Change in the Americas” is the theme of the 35th edition of the annual Journalists & Editors Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean to be held on March 27-28, 2018, at Florida International University’s Miami Beach Urban Studios.
As always: follow the money.
The Trump election in 2016 is traceable to the influence of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica: the data mining and exploitation firm that took tens of millions of Facebook data users to create a psyops campaign that turned just enough voters to propel Trump to the White House. (Whether or not Mercer's CA collaborated with Moscow Center is among key questions being explored by Special Investigator Robert Mueller and his staff.)
Among Mercer's eccentricities is a fierce determination to avoid the science of climate change and global warming. Mercer is key funder of the Heartland Institute, giving at least $800,000 in 2016. The Union of Concerned Scientists website underscores the role of other major donors like the Kochs: "Heartland () once marked Earth Day by mailing out 100,000 free copies of a book claiming that “climate science has been corrupted” [40] – despite acknowledging that “…all major scientific organizations of the world have taken the official position that humankind is causing global warming.” Heartland received more than $675,000 from ExxonMobil from 1997-2006 [41]. Heartland also raked in millions from the Koch-funded organization Donors Trust through 2011."
By 2011, the Mercers had joined forces with Charles and David Koch, who own Koch Industries, and who have run a powerful political machine for decades. The Mercers attended the Kochs’ semiannual seminars, which provide a structure for right-wing millionaires looking for effective ways to channel their cash. The Mercers admired the savviness of the Kochs’ plan, which called for attendees to pool their contributions in a fund run by Koch operatives. The fund would strategically deploy the money in races across the country, although, at the time, the Kochs’ chief aim was to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. The Kochs will not reveal the identities of their donors, or the size of contributions, but the Mercers reportedly began giving at least a million dollars a year to the Kochs’ fund. Eventually, they contributed more than twenty-five million.
Of the $19 million total the Mercers gave to 44 nonprofits in 2016, about 23% went to groups working at least partly on climate misinformation. (The foundation also gave $625,000 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Rebekah Mercer is a board member.) This means the same year the powerful conservative donors were spending more than $20 million on the Trump campaign and other Republican candidates, they were also supporting organizations seeding doubt about mainstream climate science.
Trump has repeatedly questioned whether man-made climate change is real. This skepticism is shared by many of his top cabinet members, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The administration has threatened to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, excised climate information on government websites, and rolled back the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era regulations aimed at curbing emissions.
This rapid deregulatory effort was cheered at the Heartland Institute’s climate denial conference last spring, which was attended by Robert and Rebekah Mercer. It was also the theme of the group’s first-ever “America First Energy Conference” in Houston months later. Both meetings drew Trump officials, another sign of their growing relevance and reach.
“They are responsible for Trump’s denial and they take credit for it,” Davies said. “They are very proud he’s saying what they are saying.”
Between 2008 and 2016, the Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $6 million to Heartland. Its annual funding ranged from $100,000 in 2015 to $1 million in 2008, with $800,000 in 2016. Heartland declined to comment on its donors.
Tonight's FIU workshop is aimed to journalists and editors from Latin and South America, regions where local economies dependent on small scale agriculture are already being hit hard by global warming. Climate change induced migration is impacting the United States' southern border today, even if that disclosure hasn't made the Fox News crawl.
Perhaps, tonight, audience members of the FIU workshop will let their hosts know what they think about having a climate change denier in the midst of a municipality that has already invested $500 million in street and sewer and pump upgrades just to ward off the latest high tides. More to come.
Here’s How Much Money The Mercer Family Donated To Climate Misinformation Groups In 2016
The Mercer family, among President Trump’s most powerful donors, in 2016 gave nearly $4 million to groups that challenge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, tax filings reveal.
Posted on January 25, 2018, at 6:14 p.m.
Zahra Hirji BuzzFeed News Reporter
The Mercer family, the secretive GOP megadonors with ties to the alt-right, in 2016 funded several groups that deny climate change is a problem, tax filings obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal.
I'm old school when it comes to flaming others on the internet. Don't like it. Try not to do it. But FIU's inclusion on a climate change panel of a well-known industry funded denier is a bridge too far. The Miami Herald reported last week:
James Taylor — no, not the singer — is the man to call when you want an official-sounding, educated voice on why climate change isn’t happening (it is), why humans haven’t caused it (we have) or why it’s actually good for the planet (it isn’t). It’s all but impossible to find a reputable climate scientist that agrees with Taylor but his views are popular with the fossil fuel industry and climate-change deniers. He’s a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, which is notorious for a series of 2012 billboards in Chicago with the phrase “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” alongside pictures of The Unabomber, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden. Heartland was at one point funded by oil and gas giants, including Exxon Mobil. So why is he speaking in Miami Beach next week at a workshop to teach journalists and editors about covering climate change? “It’s like having a debate on gun control and not inviting the NRA,” said Alejandro Alvarado, an associate professor at Florida International University and co-organizer of the event. “The key word here is workshop. This is not a science forum. It is a workshop.”
Polluters and industry-sponsored hacks are the only ones promoting the false equivalency "workshop" and talk about whether climate change is real or not. Trump's EPA chief Scott Pruitt had to back away from his plan to offer the nation its own "workshop" on climate change and global warming. The president's pollsters suggested it was a bad time to be picking a fight on global warming, especially when Pruitt is making so much disgusting headway in deforming the mission of the agency. From Inside Climate News:
Over the past 13 months, Pruitt's EPA has taken at least 15 major actions on air pollution—all to delay, weaken or repeal protections, and all opposed by the American Lung Association and other health groups—according to an analysis by the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). The list includes the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's signature initiative to address climate change, which also would dramatically reduce smog, particulate matter, mercury and other dangerous air pollutants by slashing the amount of coal the country burns.
The point is that FIU's inclusion of a leading climate change denier is adding fuel and energy to a debate that has not only been settled by science; municipalities and counties in Florida are rapidly moving to invest tax dollars in physical infrastructure, like Miami Beach's $500 million sewer and pump upgrades, to deal with rapidly rising sea levels. Think about it. It was less than a decade ago that the Miami Herald belatedly agreed, within its executive and publisher rank, that climate change and global warming did not require the "balance" that industry groups and trade associations and leading lights and lobbyists had imposed in the public sphere.
How much more nonsense from Alt R can America stand?
We are not going back to the time when denialism could be supported because, sadly, the facts on the ground are piling up with more and more evidence that the most conservative estimates of scientists, only a few years ago, were far too conservative. Climate change is accelerating with the force, yes, of a hurricane.
I know this is still not a view embraced by the general public. Yesterday, on a fine Spring day, I walked the beach at Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne. The sand was packed with Miami families enjoying the cool (for Miami) weather and warm, clear waters. I wondered how many of the thousands had sea level rise on their minds. How many were worried about the real impacts of climate change on their children covering themselves in sand or joyously hauling buckets of water to help build castles near the tide line.
Waging the false equivalency debate on global warming bought time for polluters and lobbyists; time to mint billions while the window to create effective change at the policy level slowly closes.
A stable climate is like a perfectly spinning top. Man-made, forced climate change has knocked the spinning top into dis-equilibrium. Literally, decade by decade, the wobbling is increasing more and more wildly. A few days ago, in mid- March at base level, rain fell in the Utah's Wasatch Range. Thirty years ago, when I first experienced this region of the Rockies, winter rainfall was unthinkable. It didn't happen all of a sudden. Over the decades, the winter snowfall in the Wasatch -- once the lowest moisture content in North America -- has loaded up with moisture: consistent with rapid global warming.
Some doubters chime: this winter has been cold in the northeast! New York City experienced the most snowfall in 100 years! Science Magazine addresses that phenomenon in a recent report: "The Chill of a Warming World":
Why have some winters been so cold in some of the northern midlatitudes, even though global climate is getting hotter? Paradoxically, the answer may be that the Arctic itself is warming so quickly. Cohen et al. show that there is a clear relationship between Arctic temperatures and severe winter weather for the United States over the past two decades and that severe winter weather in the eastern United States has become more frequent as Arctic temperatures have risen. Although they were not included in the analysis, this relationship is likely valid for northern Europe and East Asia as well.
Common sense tells us what happens in a warming world, in places like the northeast where abnormally cold weather alternates with freakishly warm spells. As the ice melts, the warm spurts grow longer. The short fluxes of cold grow shorter. This trend persists until the arctic ice melts entirely; a course that science predicts could happen in the arctic north by the end of the century.
The extinction of species, as this transition occurs rather quietly, will gather to a quiet, devastating hurricane. There is no guarantee, none, that we won't be part of that movement. As sea levels rise, coastal cities will toxify. Inland, as hundreds of millions of climate refugees are forced to move to higher ground, there will be a fierce battle to protect scarce resources and food supply.
This is the future we can read in the grim days of oligarchs hardening their bunkers against common sense. It is unconscionable for FIU to lend any credence to their discredited nonsense.
“The avg temperature over the past 4 weeks in #Miami is 76.5°. That obliterates the previous record high avg temp for February (74.9°), and is *66 DAYS* ahead of climatology. In other words, Feb 1-28 of this year was the same as Apr8-May5 in an average year! #Climate #SummerIsHere. “
Separately: a recent satellite image from the western side of Florida Bay choked with algae. A bloom covers pretty much the entire bay extending well out in the the Gulf of Mexico. This is NOT NORMAL and yet the GOP Congress, Senator Marco Rubio and Gov. Rick Scott continue to DENY the need for change.
The Frost "Science" Museum is a still beautiful confusion. I took my one year old granddaughter recently, and it was much better than I expected. She had a great time among well-designed and wonderfully conceived, living exhibits of the natural world and subtropical biodiversity.
As an adult, I have a few observations.
1) Location. "Museum Park" never made sense. NEVER. Sorry I can't get over it. As usual, Miami and Miami-Dade government officials made sure that the access and physical conformation of the art and science museum would not make either visual or locational sense. The art museum is one of the most beautiful structures in Florida. It is covered up by the science museum. Oh well, the water is done and gone under that bridge.
2) Funding. Taxpayers are significantly on the hook for both museums, which were "sold" to voters on the premise that they would be self supporting by local contributors. The Frost "Science" Museum board of directors really dropped the ball. To be a world-class facility, as the museum was meant to be, significant additional funding is needed. Already, only months after opening, the wear and tear is visible. The Frosts deserve Miami's thanks for investing tens of millions, but clearly there is a problem in the board if the museum can't exist without major taxpayer support. The danger is that the Frost "Science" Museum becomes another mediocre and very expensive piece of government-supported infrastructure.
3) "Science". The greatest paradox of our time is billionaires who don't believe in climate change. (Norman Braman?) Not only are the signs all around us, but Miami is literally at ground zero among the major cities in the world for sea level rise. Yet Philip Frost doesn't believe the indisputable science of man-made climate change. This is disqualifying: if you don't believe in climate change, you can't be a "science" museum. Moreover, by dereliction, you become a second or third rate entity.
My one year old granddaughter is most certainly not going to understand what this avoidance means, but when she is my age six decades down the road she absolutely will. She and all our grandchildren and great grandchildren and further generations will say: what the fuck were those people thinking? because, in that future, people inside the bathysphere will be staring at sea life outside.
Let's not lose sight: there is hope. The board of directors can get its act together and find the funding necessary to make the museum into the world-class facility it was designed to be. Phil Frost can change his mind about climate change. He can steer the museum to channeling the world-wide interest in global warming because otherwise, it will always be an orphan.
In the meantime lots of Miami-Dade schoolchildren are visiting the museum; a very good thing. Go and learn about the incredible beauty and diversity of the natural world that sustains us.
In the Tampa Bay Times, Susan Glickman compares climate change deniers to football die-hards who will not abandon their team under any circumstances (see below). There is truth to the point. Here is an appeal to the other team.
I'm a consumer, just like you. My carbon footprint is much larger than it should be. I don't like to be made feel guilty, and this perception holds back some climate change deniers from switching sides. Whether you are guilty or not, my carbon footprint could be smaller and so could yours.
The difference between "should" and "could" is vast. "Should" implies moral approbation: if we were only better people we would all be driving a Prius, Volt, or Tesla.
No one likes being lectured or hectored unless it is a place of worship where our souls are at stake. Another way of saying: people don't like their values to be questioned unless it is from within the tent. They don't like "outsiders" telling them how they should behave. The funders of climate change denialism prey on this the same way pro-tobacco forces waved away scientific evidence and promoted cigarette consumption as the "cool" choice.
The "could" part is different.
You "could", theoretically, get from point A to point B by train, efficient bus or bicycle. The "could" part of it is practical and political. Because we do have agency over our polluting choices, polluters tip the scales in their direction.
In the United States, our choice is to be "free" to pollute to whatever extent government incentivizes consumption. I do drive a gas combustion car. I do take airline flights to see my children. I have used many plastic bags in a lifetime of grocery shopping. But as a taxpayer in the first world, I also recognize that my use of gasoline, electricity and other consumer products is shaped by government.
For example, mileage standards in autos. Another example, Florida Power and Light; a monopolistic energy supplier to my home; the regulated public corporation that controls governmental regulatory processes in Florida. I love being able to turn the lights and air conditioning on, at a flick of the switch. It's not only reliable, it's also "affordable" as FPL drumbeats into consumers' heads at every opportunity.
This critical point is embraced by the marketers of climate change denial: even if climate change is real -- even if we are responsible "to some extent", the murmur now being heard in denial circles -- adapting energy consumption away from polluting fossil fuels is "too expensive". It would cost jobs and wreck the economy.
You hear this all the time from the right-wing message machine, but hear it for what it is.
Government shapes consumer preferences to pollute in many ways. At Eye On Miami, we have been arguing local county government should halt an effort by developers to move the Urban Development Boundary because, among other problems, it reinforces the sprawling development pattern that forces more people into cars onto congested highways and streets. It is no longer possible to be willfully ignorant, when you are stuck on mind-bending traffic on US 95 or SR 826.
We could have a carbon tax or a gasoline tax: we don't.
Another example how government turns value judgments by polluters into a limited set of choices for consumers is the dismantling of campaign finance rules (Citizens United); a legal and political battle initiated by the nation's fossil fuel supply chain in the name of freedom of speech. This "conservative" bedrock principle -- that government must harnessed to protect Constitutional rights -- has no influence on climate change.
Some conservatives shrug and wave climate change away for precisely this reason: they say, there is nothing we can do about it. This hopelessness leads in only one direction: fortified bunkers where no one is safe. That is what the US military says. Just last week, the commander of the US National Guard was asked how climate change has affected his preparations for natural disasters. Air Force Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel broke with Trump on climate change, like Secretary of Defense James L. Mattis. Lengyel said climate change highlights the need to have a robust Guard presence in each state.
Strict constitutionalists often link arm-in-arm with those who are convinced that if climate change isn't fully accounted for in scripture, adaptation has no place in our lives.
President Trump's likely, imminent withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and surrendering regulatory agencies like the U.S. EPA to lobbyists and lawyers who represented polluting industries a few hours ago are further examples of hurling consumers toward forced choices and an un-American form of hopelessness.
American voters could do better and would have in 2016, if elections were secure and districts drawn fairly. In a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse observed succinctly:
The answer to why Congress doesn’t act on climate change is simple political hydraulics.
The Supreme Court let unlimited money into politics. The fossil fuel industry has unlimited money and, according to the International Monetary Fund, a multi-hundred-billion-dollar subsidy to protect. The fossil fuel industry used its unlimited money (and related threats) to capture the Republican Party. Climate change then became “partisan” and untouchable.
It’s actually not that complicated.
The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees got in the habit of doing what they were told by the forces that appointed them (which include the fossil fuel industry, which asked for the Citizens United decision), and in a fateful combination of obedience and political ignorance, they wrecked our politics.
Before Citizens United there were multiple bipartisan climate bills every year; afterward, none.
Recent studies of public attitudes show that anxiety about climate change is burning through populations who understand that unpredictable shifts in food production, massive wildfires in the American West and climate-change fueled Category 5 hurricanes are a preview of what's to come. In an August 2017 Pew Research Center review of public attitudes in 38 countries, in public perceptions of the threat to security, climate change was second just behind ISIS. (In Latin America and Africa, climate change was viewed as the number one threat.)
How has temperature changed in each country over the last century? Here is a data visualisation showing temperature anomaly –the departure from the long-term average – by country from 1900-2016. Visualisation by Antti Lipponen (@anttilip) of the Finnish Meteorological Institute based on GISTEMP data (CC BY 2.0).
“These facts (on climate change impacts) have been presented to the world time-and-time again for decades. Quite simply, we are knowingly doing this to ourselves, to our planet and to our future, and the cost of our inaction is becoming clearer... Yet with all of this evidence – the independent scientific warnings, and the mounting economic price tag – there is still an astounding level of willful ignorance and inaction from the people who should be doing the most to protect us, and every other living thing on this planet.”
Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity. As the bishops of Southern Africa have stated: “Everyone’s talents and involvement are needed to redress the damage caused by human abuse of God’s creation”. All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents.
At the time, some American conservatives clucked that Pope Francis should stick to religion, but climate change is not a matter to be cherry-picked like sermon topics. It is real. It is happening now. And most troubling of all, there is nothing in the trend lines showing climate change impacts have plateau'ed. In fact, we are cooking our children's future right quick.
The best way forward is to vote in 2018 for incumbents and candidates who will act in taxpayers' and voters' best interests on climate change and against politicians rooted in denialism and falsehoods spread by polluting industries.
As a native Floridian, I chose to ride out Hurricane Irma in my hometown of Tampa — just a few miles north of where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play football. Like millions of other Floridians who evacuated low-lying beach communities for higher ground, I had the obvious safety concerns and worries about whether I would even have a home to return to. But as a public interest advocate who has worked on climate and energy issues every day for almost two decades, I also have intense concerns about the growing climate change/hurricane nexus.
So when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says it's insensitive to Floridians and Texans to talk about climate change during hurricane emergencies, I say he missed the boat as to what's truly insensitive.
Me on the slushy Athabasca glacier in Jasper, Canada. They are counting the months that this glacier can STILL be visited as it is getting unsafe. I am fortunate to have seen it.
Athabasca Glacier largest of 6 forming part of Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park (I thought it was 5 glaciers wiki says 8, just guess yourself - how about a bunch)
Think of this as a sketch of the receding Columbia Icefield Glacier Athabasca, as you cannot superimpose photos taken at different angles accurately and we can't see the depth loss (there are 5 Glaciers from this Canadian Icefield). "the Columbia Icefield, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, is one of the major sources of fresh water ice in North America.
1917
I took this in August 2017
Look at it another way:
30 YEARS = GONE
According to CBC News in 2014:
A recent American state-of-the-union report has singled out the rapid melt of glaciers in British Columbia and Alaska as a major climate change issue saying they are "shrinking substantially."
The U.S. National Climate Assessment said the trend is expected to continue and has implications for hydro-power production, ocean circulation patterns, fisheries and a global rise in sea levels.
The report said glaciers in the region are losing 20 to 30 per cent as much as what is melting annually from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has received far more worldwide attention.
Wilmshurst said it's estimated that the Athabasca Glacier is about 300 metres deep, but it is slowly disappearing.
"It is hard to know in the long term what climate cycles mean to people. It does mean we should be preparing for drier conditions in the future. I think long term it's not good news at all," he said.
"Absolutely the glacier will be gone. Not within my lifetime, probably, but maybe within my children's lifetime."
Also read...
“The Athabasca Glacier is the single best accessible example of what we are seeing happening in the world today because of climate change,” said Bob Sandford, director of the Western Watersheds Climate Research Collaborative and the Canadian Chair of the United Nations 2005, decade-long, Water for Life initiative. “We have been using the glaciers as a kind of climate change canary. What we’re finding now is that the canary has already sung.”
That the article is disappointing isn't a surprise. How could it be, when the over-arching issue of the public response to climate change is such a disappointment.
Earlier studies acknowledge that too much doom and gloom turns people off the subject, or, irrigates a sense of hopelessness; ie. nothing can be done, it's the weather.
The primary driver of the public response to climate change continues to be the profit principle. Those with the most to gain, like the fossil fuel supply chain and large centralized, leviathan electricity producers, continue to game out scenarios that allow them to continue to profit -- in some cases, guaranteed by public policies -- as long as possible. On the other hand, government policies, when in the hands of those who believe climate change mitigation is an essential goa, can incentivize economic behavior and energy production that is less damaging to the atmosphere compared to carbon and methane emissions.
Bluntly, the science of climate change is resolved: it is happening, and it is happening at a rate much faster than science anticipated only a decade ago. It is also well established that contrarians in the science community have ties to polluters and anti-science initiatives by corporate sponsors in the past, ie. tobacco and Big Sugar.
Eye On Miami takes the side that sounding the alarm bells continues to be the most clarifying position. We speak from experience in Florida, having spent nearly 30 years calling out similar messages on the fate of the Everglades and Florida Bay.
We know what needs to be done. We just haven't been able to summon the political will, the voters and leadership to protect our shared future. The result is muddy at best, but our conscience is clear.
It took our Miami Herald a long time -- and several publishers -- to come around to putting climate change on the front page and the editorial section, but the Herald finally did. An editorial in this morning's paper, apropos of recent tropical deluge, called the public response to climate change "a long slog". Maybe not so long.
A recent Pew Trust poll found that public concern around the world for climate change was second only to the threat of ISIS. What the report, "Globally, people point to ISIS and climate change as leading security threats", also makes clear is that public views in the United States continue to be slogged by the Fox News effect.
Fox is the FAKE NEWS channel favored by President Trump that routinely bashes environmental and especially climate change concerns, suppressing science and misleading the public with conspiracy theories.
Paradoxically, the themes of the "long slog ahead", conspiracy theories and existential threats of climate change merged in a fascinating, recent podcast by NPR Fresh Air, "Inside The Global Seed Vault, Where The History And Future Of Agriculture Is Stored".
The seed vault, conceived and implemented by Fresh Air guest Carrie Fowler, is built into the side of a Norwegian mountain, seven hundred miles south of the North Pole. It is intended to protect the world's biodiversity from doomsday scenarios like climate change.
Fowler, bemused by Alt-right megaphones who imagine a corporate conspiracy at work, is far more concerned about the impacts of climate change on agriculture. He points to supermarket shelves filled with food and basic staples of our diet that require a low carbon atmosphere to thrive.
If you can't listen to the whole podcast, I urge you to scroll in and listen at minute 33.
... in my family, we really regarded farmers as public servants and people to be esteemed. And so I was always favorably inclined, if you will, towards farmers. And to make the story a bit shorter, I was working on a book many years ago about agriculture and came across the writings of a man named Jack Harlan, who I discovered was probably the most eminent scientist in the field.
And he was talking in very dramatic terms about what it would mean if we lost this genetic diversity in agriculture. And he said that we were facing cataclysmic starvation on a scale we can not imagine. And what he was referring to was that, you know, evolution is always ongoing in the fields. And pests and diseases are constantly mutating and mounting better attacks against our food crops. And the reason that you and I don't have to worry about that too much and the reason that our grocery stores are pretty well stocked is that plant breeders have kept up with these diseases and pests by taking genes, by taking traits from older varieties and crossbreeding it with modern varieties and creating better, newer, more resistant varieties that can cope with environmental stresses and pests and diseases.
But if we lose those traits, if we don't have sense enough to conserve them - and conserving them is very simple and it's very cheap - but if we don't have the sense enough to do that nationally and globally, then we may very well put ourselves in a situation where the trait that we need to give resistance to a particular crop just isn't there anymore. And we have had a number of close calls. And we're having some now even. Again, it's not something that makes the front page of the newspaper, but it's something to be concerned about.
... So when we look at the future and we realize that the hottest years of the past, where we had, by the way, big crop production problems, will in the future be the coldest years. Then we can begin to understand that we're going to really face a lot of trouble. It's projected that by mid-century, half of the cropland of more than than half of the countries in Africa will be in a climate regime that has never before been experienced by agriculture. So we're headed towards climates that are pre-wheat, pre-rice, pre-corn, even pre-agriculture. And I think that, you know, what that's going to do is it's going to put together new assemblages of species where species are already on the move.
So we're going to be growing crops surrounded by new pests and diseases in New climate conditions with different soil microorganisms, different rainfall patterns. And this is going to, I think, create a lot of uncertainty and surprises and heightened risk in agricultural systems and an increased vulnerability among people who are already food insecure. And the take-home message is that our crops don't come pre-adapted to new conditions. They are domesticated crops. Think about that word, domesticated. They've entered the domicile. Their evolution is in our hands.
Here is a point for the Herald editorial board and for others to consider: that we may be dealing with the impact of sea level rise in the future, requiring massive expenditure of tax dollars, at the same time as food insecurity -- as a result of climate change -- creates instant emergencies and civil disorder. As Fowler, and many other observers have noted, climate change has already played a major factor in the wars in Syria, other drought-impacted regions of the Mideast and Africa. Civil disorder driven by climate change is already in our domicile.
We are all living on borrowed time, but as climate change reality emerges, we begin to see the amount we borrowed could break the collective bank.
With global warming, civilization is skating on the edge of bankruptcy. It doesn't seem so, today. Our supermarkets aisles are flush with food and choices, but anxieties are not misplaced: it is the reason climate change has risen to the top of global worries ... just not yet in the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States, where voters continue to be mislead by FAKE NEWS Fox and carefully planned strategies of the world's most powerful polluters, their "think tanks" and false idols.
Time for voters to wake up? Yes. Let's hope the awakening starts in Florida. That would be rough justice.
