https://www.nirs.org/press/no-climate-money-nuclear-power/ International Coalition Says “NO!” To Nuclear Industry Attempts to Raid $100 Billion Global Climate FundTim Judson, NIRS +1 212-729-1169 (mobile) TimJ@nirs.org, Peer de Rijk, WISE-International, + 31 20 6126368, Director@wiseinternational.org, August 8, 2017 Gedelitz, Germany – An international coalition lead by organizations from nine countries launched a new campaign today–“Don’t Nuke the Climate”–to ensure nuclear power and other false climate solutions do not derail global efforts to reduce the extent of global warming. The coalition is mobilizing for the COP 23 global climate conference in November, where the nations of the world are meeting to make critical decisions on how to solve the problem of climate change. Specifically, the fate of $100 billion per year of investment is at stake the Green Climate Fund. Nuclear power companies are attempting to gain access to the fund to finance uneconomic power projects, which their own governments and the private sector will not or cannot fund.
The Paris Climate Agreement, signed by 195 countries, established a global consensus for the goal of limiting global warming to at most 2.0 C (3.8 F), with an ambition to go no higher than 1.5 C (2.7 F). The Paris Agreement’s targets are not arbitrary: a global average temperature rise of 1.5-2.0 C will still have enormous human, economic, and environmental impacts: sea-level rise, severe storms, drought and food shortages, resource conflicts, refugee crises, etc. Achieving these goals is literally a matter of life and death, but there is much uncertainty about the global community’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to meet those goals.
The Don’t Nuke the Climate coalition is mobilizing for Bonn with the simple message: we can and must meet the goals of Paris–real, viable climate solutions are at hand–but not if we waste time and money on false solutions like nuclear power. The coalition mobilized in 2015 for the COP 21 climate conference in Paris, and grew to a total of 500 organizations worldwide supporting the “Don’t Nuke the Climate” call.
“We urgently need to tackle climate change. But we have to do this in a just way,” said Peer de Rijk, director of WISE-International. “This means we must actively exclude false solutions like nuclear power, as we otherwise will be thrown back in time and increase the environmental crisis.”
“Nuclear power is a serial human rights violator and its promotion will worsen the very climate justice problems the Green Climate Fund is supposed to solve,” said Tim Judson, executive director the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, based in the U.S.A. “Nuclear corporations target First Nations and Global South countries are for radioactive contamination and resource destruction, radiation has a disparate impact on women and girls, and these persistent pollutants are hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years, creating indiscriminate impacts on future generations. The Green Climate Fund must never be used to finance such violations of human rights and principles of climate justice,” Judson concluded.
The coalition is opposing intensified efforts by the nuclear power industry to gain access to financing for nuclear power projects through the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The GCF was founded through global climate talks in 2009, and the 2015 Global Climate Agreement set a target of $100 billion per year in financing to Global South countries for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (labeled “mitigation” measures) and infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change (labeled “adaptation” measures).
“South-Africa is in urgent need for robust climate action,” said Makoma Lekalakala That means money for adaptation but also clean, affordable, safe new energy for everyone. A choice for nuclear would only increase the financial burden put upon millions of South-Africans.”
“The Indian state often blocks international negotiations on climate citing the needs of its poor,” said Kumar Sundaram, director of Dianuke in India. “But that in reality is nothing more than the Indian elite and industries demanding for the right to be equally irresponsible with the climate. Domestically, the government policies are only widening the energy access gap and imposing nuclear, coal and big dam projects that threaten to destroy fragile ecologies and most vulnerable communities. It’s unfortunate that the Indian government’s climate policy reinforces the myth of nuclear power being safe and clean. India is standing on the wrong side of history in the post-Fukushima world – setting up world’s biggest, costliest and most unsafe imported nuclear plants by undermining safety and environmental clearance norms and brutalizing massive but peaceful grassroots. India cannot be allowed to be a liability-free market where the declining global nuclear lobby rehabilitates itself.”
Nuclear power’s economic failures are worsening, with major firms such as Westinghouse and Areva going bankrupt, reactors being shut down, and new reactors canceled due to excessive costs, chronic construction delays, and aging infrastructure. Without access to massive amounts of public dollars such as the GCF, the industry faces inevitable decline, and cannot compete against true climate solutions, such as solar, wind, and energy efficiency and conservation.
As a result of, the industry has intensified its lobbying effort since Paris, and now includes industry trade associations, such as Foratom; the International Atomic Energy Agency; major nuclear corporations, including Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation, which is targeting developing nations for nuclear development; and nuclear professional organizations and front groups, including the World Nuclear Society and Nuclear for Climate.
“Nuclear is dying – without taxpayer subsidies,” said Reinhard Uhrig, Head of Campaigns for Global 2000, the Austrian affiliate of Friends of the Earth International. “It now promotes itself as ‘green’, carbon-free electricity (which it is not) to get at public money such as in the climate funds established to combat global warming in particular in the global south. We cannot let the nuclear lobby get away with this – no subsidies for nuclear!”
“Nuclear is too expensive and takes too long to build, and we need real climate solutions today,” said Vladimir Sliviak, executive director of Ecodefense, based in Russia. “The effective approach is developing renewable energy and energy efficiency. We don’t have money or time to spend on false solutions.”
The coalition is urging nations participating in the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to prohibit the use of the Green Climate Fund on technologies that make the societal and environmental impacts of climate change worse, like nuclear power, so-called “clean” coal, large-scale hydro-power, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil, food- and forest-based biomass, and REDD+ — which are broadly considered false solutions and frequently entail human rights violations.
“There is no acceptable solution worldwide for high level radioactive waste, the only consequence is to stop nuclear power right now,” said Kerstin Rudek from Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Lüchow-Dannenberg, based in Germany.
“It’s a shame that Germany failed to include the uranium enrichment facility in Gronau and the fuel element factory in Lingen in its nuclear phaseout policy. Both facilities export to nuclear power plant in Belgium and in France. Germany needs a complete nuclear phaseout and has to start immediately with phasing out coal as well.”
Organizations leading the “Don’t Nuke the Climate” coalition represent nine nations spanning four continents:
Global/International
World Information Service on Energy – International
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
Independent 10th Aug 2017,The Trump administration has released a report confirming that 2016 was the
hottest year since records began. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), a leading environmental agency which is part of the
US federal government, found that global temperatures were warmer last year
than in 137 years of recordkeeping for a third consecutive year –
surpassing the previous record of 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/donald-trump-administration-report-2016-hottest-year-record-noaa-state-of-climate-a7886971.html
Independent 11th Aug 2017,The Government has been accused of undermining its own efforts to tackle
climate change after new research revealed it is investing twice as much in
fossil fuel projects overseas as it is in renewables.
Independent 10th Aug 2017, The BBC has been criticised for inviting a climate change denier to come on
air and voice his belief that global warming isn’t happening. Science
broadcasters including Brian Cox and Jim al-Khalili criticised the decision
to bring on famous denialist Nigel Lawson, apparently to make sure that
there was a balanced debate.
Both pointed out that there is very little debate about global warming – an established fact on which almost every
mainstream scientist is agreed. Lord Lawson was able to make a number of
claims, which went mostly unchallenged. He said, for instance, that the
world had actually become colder over the last 10 years – despite the fact
that 2014, 2015 and 2016 have been the hottest years on record.
Guardian 10th Aug 2017,Norway’s plan to ramp up oil and gas production in the Arctic threatens
global efforts to tackle climate change, according to a new study.
The research says 12 gigatonnes of carbon could be added by exploration sites
in the Barents Sea and elsewhere over the next 50 years, which is 1.5 times
more than the Norwegian fields currently being tapped or under
construction.
The authors of the report from Oil Change International – an
NGO backed by Friends of the Earth, WWF and Greenpeace – say this
undermines the 2015 Paris agreement to cut worldwide emissions in order to
keep the planet’s temperature rise to between 1.5C and 2C.
Obama’s climate regulations could save the United States billions — but they face a precarious future under the Trump administration. NATASHA GEILING AUG 9, 2017 On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to extend a freeze in litigation over the Clean Power Plan, the signature domestic climate policy of the Obama administration and a primary target of the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback, dimming environmentalists’ hopes that the court could ultimately save the otherwise doomed policy.
The Clean Power Plan imposed the first-ever federal limits for carbon pollution from power plants, and when it was finalized in 2015, immediately drew opposition from a coalition of fossil fuel interests, utility groups, and conservative states. The coalition challenged the Clean Power Plan in court and the Supreme Court issued a stay on the rule in 2016, pending ongoing litigation in the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments for the case beginning in September of 2016, and had seemed ready to issue a decision as early as spring of 2017.
That all changed, however, when President Donald Trump assumed office in January. Trump, who does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change, railed against the rule through his presidential campaign, pledging to undo the regulation as part of his vast rollback of Obama-era environmental policies. In late March, the Trump Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia not to render a decision in the case, arguing that it would be premature to rule on a regulation that the administration was in the process of undoing. The court agreed, at least in part, with the Trump administration, issuing a 60-day freeze in litigation in late-April.
Tuesday’s decision extends that stay for another two months, dashing hopes that the court could revive the rule either by ruling in favor of the regulation or remanding it to the EPA for modifications, rather than complete repeal and rewrite.
But in a concurring opinion, two judges included a stark rebuff to the idea that the EPA could rely on the court to delay the regulation — reminding the agency that the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which relied on volumes of scientific evidence to classify carbon emissions as a public health threat, compels the agency to act to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Combined with the existing stay of the rule from the Supreme Court, the two judges — both nominated by Democratic presidents — argued that the court’s extension of the pause in litigation amounted to “relieving EPA of its obligation to comply with that statutory duty for the indefinite future.”
Trump’s environmental assault met with immediate legal challenges
Environmental groups are ready to take Trump to court.
“We are in a race against time to protect our communities and families from the clear and present danger of climate pollution,” Tomás Carbonell, directory of regulator policy and senior attorney for Environmental Defense Fund, which is one of the groups defending the Clean Power Plan, said in a statement. “EDF, along with millions of concerned Americans, will keep working to ensure EPA complies with its legal obligations and acts to protect our nation from climate pollution.”
The court’s decision came just days after legal experts from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law released new analysis looking at the economic benefits of Obama-era climate and environmental regulations, including the Clean Power Plan. According to the analysis, the total benefits of maintaining several Obama-era regulations on greenhouse gas emissions could reach almost $370 billion by 2030. The analysis found that some of the highest benefits came from implementing the Clean Power Plan, which could by itself could create $46 billion in economic benefits by 2030. Those benefits came from the estimated reduction in emissions, as well as greater efficiency and lower health costs as a result of declines in pollution. The analysis also estimated that the Clean Power Plan could create as many as 59,700 new jobs by 2020.
OVER THE next week or so, the Trump administration must decide whether to approve or suppress a major federal climate change report. Though scientists have signed off on its findings, including that the average U.S. temperature has spiked in the past several decades and that humans have almost certainly played a predominant role, President Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have indicated they simply do not believe the experts.
Even as the federal climate assessment has been under review, the warnings have grown starker.
A paper published last week in Nature Climate Change offered a harrowing view. International negotiators committed in Paris to keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the point past which experts warn warming could be very dangerous. Analysts from the University of Washington and the University of California at Santa Barbara found that there is only a 5 percent chance the world will achieve that goal.
Instead of predicting how technology or policy might change, the researchers looked at how nations have done until now and inferred from those trends what will happen in the future. As economies expand, they emit more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. Fortunately, over time economies also produce more efficiently, using less fuel and therefore emitting less carbon dioxide for every widget assembled or mile driven. By projecting population growth, economic expansion and carbon efficiency into the future, the analysts came up with a rough guide to where the global temperature will be at the end of the century.
They found that there is a 90 percent chance the world will warm between 2 degrees and 4.9 degrees Celsius, with a median of 3.2 degrees. Though this avoids the most alarming scenarios scientists have previously considered, it also excludes the least concerning, finding virtually no chance the Earth will keep warming below the desirable level of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
How does this translate into the real world? Some other new research provides answers. Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles found that at 4.5 degrees of temperature rise by 2100, highly populated and impoverished swaths of South Asia would experience heat waves so extreme that human beings would not be able to survive without protection. At 2.25 degrees of warming, heat-wave temperatures in the region would be dangerous but not as deadly. Another new analysis from European Union researchers warned that deaths due to extreme weather across Europe could increase from about 3,000 per year to 152,000 annually if the Earth warmed 3 degrees by century’s end.
Each of these studies comes with caveats. For example, much of the risk would be averted with a strong global commitment to cutting carbon dioxide emissions, particularly if green technology became significantly cheaper, making it easier to decarbonize than in the past. Yet even if the breakthroughs do not come, or do not come fast enough, the latest research suggests it is neither unrealistic nor pointless to aim for the low end of the range of possible climate outcomes, even over 2 degrees, to at least limit the damage to the planet’s habitability. That path, however, requires leaders to admit there is a problem.
Super-heatwaves of 55°C to emerge if global warming continues http://www.enn.com/climate/article/52119 10 Aug 17, Heatwaves amplified by high humidity can reach above 40°C and may occur as often as every two years, leading to serious risks for human health. If global temperatures rise with 4°C, a new super heatwave of 55°C can hit regularly many parts of the world, including Europe.
A recently published study by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) – the European Commission’s science and knowledge service – analyses the interaction between humidity and heat. The novelty of this study is that it looks not only at temperature but also relative humidity to estimate the magnitude and impact of heat waves.
It finds out that the combinations of the two, and the resulting heatwaves, leave ever more people exposed to significant health risks, especially in East Asia and America’s East Coast.
Warm air combined with high humidity can be very dangerous as it prevents the human body from cooling down through sweating, leading to hyperthermia. As a result, if global warming trends continue, many more people are expected to suffer sun strokes, especially in densely populated areas of India, China and the US. Read more at European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)
‘Unusual’ Greenland wildfires linked to peat, BBC News, By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent, 9 August 2017
New images have been released of wildfires that continue to burn close to the Greenland ice sheet, on the country’s west coast.Fires are rare on an island where 80% of the land is covered by ice up to 3km thick in places.
However, satellites have observed smoke and flames north-east of a town called Sisimiut since 31 July.
Experts believe at least two fires are burning in peat that may have dried out as temperatures have risen.
A song of fire and ice? Researchers say that across Greenland there is now less surface water than in the past, which could be making vegetation more susceptible to fire. The latest satellite images show a number of plumes. Police have warned hikers and tourists to stay away from the region because of the dangers posed by smoke. There are also concerns that the fire will damage grazing for reindeer.
Scientists believe that instead of shrubs or mosses, the likely source is fire in the peaty soil, which can only burn when dry.
“Usually when a wildfire is smouldering like that it’s because there’s a lot of ground-level fuel, carbon organic matter; that’s why I assume that it’s peat,” wildfire expert Prof Jessica McCarty from Miami University, US, told BBC News.
“The fire line is not moving, the fire is not progressing like we’d see in a forest fire, so that means it’s burning whatever fuel is on the ground.”
Prof McCarthy believes that melting permafrost is likely to have contributed to this outbreak. She referred to studies carried out in the region that showed degraded permafrost around the town of Sisimiut.
Locals say that what they call “soil fires” have happened before, especially in the last 20-30 years. Researchers have been busily examining the satellite record to look for evidence of previous outbreaks.
“The only record I found is the MODIS active fire record. It’s a satellite that measures the temperature of the surface and can locate hotspots from fire,” said Dr Stef Lhermitte from Delft University in the Netherlands.
“I think that fires have been there before but what’s different is that this fire is big, in Greenlandic terms; that is unusual. It’s the biggest one we have in the satellite record.”
Dr Lhermitte’s analysis suggest that the satellite has detected more fires in 2017 alone in Greenland than in the 15 years it has been operating. A previous large outbreak was seen in 2015…….http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40877099
“Throughout the history of the church, people have always found ways to use God and scripture to justify empire, to justify oppression and exploitation,” Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, an organizer with a pro-environmental Christian group called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), told me. “It’s a convenient theology to hold, especially when we are called to drastic, difficult action.”
How Fossil Fuel Money Made Climate Change Denial the Word of God Brendan O’Connor, Splinter , 8 Aug 17 In 2005,at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., the National Association of Evangelicals was on the verge of doing something novel: affirming science. Specifically, the 30-million-member group, which represents 51 Christian denominations, was debating how to advance a new platform called “For the Health of a Nation.” The position paper—written the year before An Inconvenient Truth kick-started sense of public urgency around climate change—included a call for evangelicals to protect God’s creation, and to embrace the government’s help in doing so. The NAE’s board had already adopted it unanimously before presenting it to the membership for debate.
At the time, many in the evangelical movement were uncomfortable with its close ties to the Republican anti-environmental regulation agenda. That year, a group called the Evangelical Alliance of Scientists and Ethicists protested the GOP-led effort to rewrite the Endangered Species Act, and the NAE’s vice president of governmental affairs Richard Cizik pushed for the organization to endorse John McCain and Joe Lieberman’s cap-and-trade bill. “For the Health of a Nation,” which Cizik also pushed, was an opportunity to draw a bright line between their support of right-wing social positions on abortion and civil rights and a growing sentiment that God’s creation needed protection from industry……..
At the behest of a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the board buckled, releasing a statement in February 2006 “recognizing the ongoing debate” on global warming and “the lack of consensus among the evangelical community on the issue.” Just days later, an outside group of 86 evangelical leaders, under the aegis of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, issued a “Call to Action” declaring that climate change was real and that “millions of people could die from it in this century.”
For his trouble, Cizik was targeted by a collection of hard right Christians, who petitioned the NAE board to muzzle him or force him to resign. “Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children,” their letter read. It also implied that Cizik, who had worked for the NAE for nearly three decades, supported abortion, giving condoms to children, and infanticide…….
The NAE did eventually endorse climate action in 2015. But it was too late. By that time, a corps of right-wing Christians, funded by fossil-fuel interests, had hijacked the public and political machinery of the evangelical movement. They are now in the White House, where the anti-environmental agenda is dominated by Christian fundamentalists like EPA Commissioner Scott Pruitt while the more moderate views offormer ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson are ignored. This is the story of how they did it.
At a town hall in Michigan last May, Republican Rep. Tim Walberg assured his constituents that, while the climate may be changing, they don’t need to be concerned. “As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” he told them. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, He can take care of it.”
This idea—that whatever happens in God’s creation happens with His blessing—has deep roots in the American evangelical community, especially among the elite fundamentalists who walk the halls of power in Washington, D.C. For years, an evangelical minister named Ralph Drollinger has held weekly Bible studies for members of Congress, preaching that social welfare programs are un-Christian and agitating for military action against Iran. (In December 2015, he expressed his desire to shape Donald Trump into a benevolent, Christian dictator.) Drollinger also teaches that climate change caused by humans is impossible in light of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood: “To think that man can alter the earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man,” he wrote recently.
Conservative groups, funded by fossil fuel magnates, spend approximately one billion dollars every year interfering with public understanding of what is actually happening to our world. Most of that money—most of the fraction of it that can be tracked, anyway—goes to think tanks that produce policy papers and legislative proposals favorable to donors’ interests, super PACs that support politicians friendly to industry or oppose those who are not, or mercenary lobbyists and consultants, in some instances employing the same people who fought to suppress the science on smoking. In terms of impact, however, few investments can rival the return that the conservative donor class has gotten from the small cohort of evangelical theologians and scholars whose work has provided scriptural justifications for apocalyptic geopoliticsand economic rapaciousness.
“Throughout the history of the church, people have always found ways to use God and scripture to justify empire, to justify oppression and exploitation,” Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, an organizer with a pro-environmental Christian group called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), told me. “It’s a convenient theology to hold, especially when we are called to drastic, difficult action.”
Many of these soothsayers are gathered together in an organization called the Cornwall Alliance—formerly known as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the same group that mobilized against Cizik’s environmental proposal—a network with ties to politicians and secular think tanks across the conservative landscape. In 2013, Cornwall published an anti-environmentalist manifesto called Resisting the Green Dragon. “False prophets promise salvation if only we will destroy the means of maintaining our civilization. No more carbon, they say, or the world will end and blessings will cease,”it warns. “Pagans of all stripes now offer their rival views of salvation, all of which lead to death.” Members of the Cornwall Alliance and their ilk are not simply theoreticians but enforcers, stifling dissent in the wider American evangelical community, smothering environmentalist tendencies before they gain a following………
For almost 20 years, Beisner and members of the Cornwall Alliance have worked with establishment conservatives to bolster opposition to climate change: The Heartland Institute identifies him as a policy advisor on its web site, and he speaks regularly at the institute’s annual conference on climate change (though in an interview he curiously denied ever actually giving any policy advice to Heartland). The Heritage Foundation hosted the 2015 premierof Where the Grass is Greener, a documentary produced by the Cornwall Alliance. In May, Beisner and senior executives from Heartland, Heritage, and a slew of other billionaire-funded political entities like Americans for Prosperity and the Competitive Enterprise Institute sent a letter to Donald Trump urging him to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and asking him to stop funding United Nations global warming programs.
Together, Cornwall, Heartland, and Heritage have been able to set the terms of the conservative conversation—evangelical or otherwise—about the climate. They determine what science is acceptable, which proposed solutions can be considered, and what the consequences of inaction might look like. “There’s a very strong connection between those institutions and the evangelical Right,” Rev. Hescox told me. “Their denial of the science—and really portraying this as a big government issue—is why there was so much pushback among evangelicals.”
The Cornwall Alliance, joined by scientists associated with organizations partly funded by ExxonMobil, continued hammering away at Christian groups that supported action on climate change. In 2008, it launched the bizarrely named “We Get It!” campaign, which targeted the Evangelical Climate Initiative and was endorsed by a slew of conservative organizations, including the Family Research Council and David Barton’s WallBuilders…..
Given that it is a relatively small operation with relatively low overhead, the money that the Cornwall Alliance receives is a vanishingly small fraction of the hundreds of millions spent by the Koch, the Mercer, or the DeVos families. (The Kochs are oil, coal, and gas scions; Robert Mercer is a hedge fund manager who, with his daughter Rebekah, fueled Trump’s rise; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick are long-time Republican donors).
Their money flows through a multitude of nonprofits, front groups, and donor-advised funds. (A donor-advised fund is a kind of money-laundering service for philanthropists who don’t want anyone to know where their money is going: They make a contribution to the fund, and then tell the fund where to send the money; as a nonprofit, the fund has to disclose all of the grants that it makes, but it does not need to disclose its own donors, nor what direction those donors attached to their money.) Donors Trust, the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement, contributed $1,001,500 to the James Partnership between 2009 and 2015; in most years, this constituted around half of the Partnership’s total revenue………
…….billions are paying off. Not only have the people who funded Cornwall successfully stopped the government from pursuing policies that might make the lives of people who are living with the consequences of climate change a little bit better, but under the Trump administration their lackeys are actively working to dismantle what little progress has been made. When Drollinger teaches that God’s covenant with Noah means that the consequences of climate change not only will not but in fact cannot be as devastating as scientists believe, he echoes a lengthy essay published by the Cornwall Alliance in 2009 that lays out the same argument. Typical of the organization’s style, it appears to the casual observer like any policy paper drawn up at one of D.C.’s many think tanks and nonprofits; in reality, the document blends quotations from scripture with pseudo-scientific data—citing, for example, the Mercer-funded Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. During Pruitt’s confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. John Barrasso favorably cited Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance’s support for the Oklahoma attorney general……http://splinternews.com/how-fossil-fuel-money-made-climate-denial-the-word-of-g-1797466298
To Stop Global Warming, Should Humanity Dim the Sky? The world’s top geoengineering researchers met off the record to discuss the possibility in Maine last month. ROBINSON MEYER, The Atlantic AUG 7, 2017 Late last month, about 100 researchers from around the world gathered at Logan International Airport in Boston. A fleet of buses appeared to whisk them to a remote and luxurious ski resort in northeastern Maine.…….They had gathered to discuss how to provide humanity one last line of defense against catastrophic global warming: solar geoengineering.
The idea behind solar geoengineering is simple. For the last four decades, humanity has struggled to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere. We have decommissioned nuclear plants, introduced millions of new gasoline-burning cars to the roadway, and dawdled through treaty after treaty. Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has only risen.
It sure seems like we’ll need some more time to get our act together. So maybe we should toy with another variable: While we try to reduce the planet’s heat-trapping gas, maybe we can also try to reduce the amount of heat entering the atmosphere in the first place.
Interest in the technique has spiked recently. An administration hostile to climate mitigation has taken power in the United States, and some countries risk falling short of the promises they made under the Paris Agreement. It seems suddenly plausible that the industrialized world will not succeed in staving off two degrees of temperature rise.
Governments and private donors have opened their pockets in advance of that failure. This summer, China’s national Ministry of Science and Technology announced it will fund a 15-person, $3 million geoengineering research programat Beijing Normal University. It will join several government-funded teams working on the same problem in Germany as well.
This fall, Harvard University will also launch its own solar geoengineering research with $7.5 million in funding from private sources. Its leaders hope to eventually amass a budget of $20 million.
So the conference, organized by Gordon Research Conferences, was well-timed. It is thought to be the largest gathering of geoengineering scientists ever assembled, and its participants included almost every senior researcher in the field. It was held under the Chatham House rule, which proscribed attendees from disclosing who said what, but its agenda and attendees list are available online…….
There are several ways of holding off that warmth. They all involve bouncing sunlight back into space before it penetrates too far into the lower atmosphere. Over the past decade, scientists have discussed some different ways to do this: by brightening clouds over the ocean; by pushing cirrus clouds to form in the high atmosphere; or by spraying a reflective gas into the sky at high altitudes, mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption.
Last month’s meeting arrived at the consensus that this final technique—called stratospheric aerosol injection—is the best bet going forward. Researchers don’t see a technological impediment to developing seeding tools, seeing the few remaining problems as within the capability of any large aerospace company. There are plenty of natural precedents for stratospheric aerosols, too—volcanoes have gone off hundreds of time during human history—and they see it as the most reversible and easy to model.
“When you put particles in the stratosphere, it’s simpler to calculate what the effect would be on the energy budget and on the temperature,” said Storelvmo. “Anything that involves clouds generally becomes much more complicated.”
It also benefits from some built-in economies of scale. “With the physics [of stratospheric injection], you can have huge multipliers. You put one particle in the stratosphere and it can deflect trillions of photons,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a presenter at last month’s meeting.
This neat efficiency separates solar geoengineering from its sibling, “carbon geoengineering,” which aims to directly scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. If perfected, carbon geoengineering could permanently solve the problem of global warming, but researchers consider the technological advances needed to accomplish it far-off, and the meeting didn’t address it……
Yet this makes the most feasible form of geoengineering (dimming the sun) only a stopgap—albeit a tentatively effective one. “Most of the climate models project that solar geoengineering could offset most climate change for most people most of the time. But in climate models, if something goes wrong, you can run the model again. In the real world you don’t have that option,” Caldeira said.
So much of the meeting was devoted to the natural follow-up question: What could go wrong?
The most glaring concerns are about how stratospheric aerosol injection could affect the water cycle, “whether it could induce droughts or floods or things like that,” said Storelvmo. Many researchers describe that as the riskiest aspect of solar geoengineering right now……
It’s also unclear how much solar geoengineering will be required to hold off the worst symptoms of climate change. Because the equator receives stronger, more frequent sunlight than the poles, stratospheric aerosols would chill the tropics more than they would the higher latitudes. This could trap wannabe geoengineers in a dosage dilemma.“If you’re interested in stopping ice sheets from melting, you can’t just make global temperature constant. You have to overcool it to reach the high latitudes,” said Robock.
A similar mechanism could create even nastier water-cycle problems. Stratospheric aerosols may cool the continents more than they cool the oceans, equalizing the normal pressure difference between land and sea—and, in turn, killing the seasonal monsoons of Asia and Africa. Food prices worldwide would skyrocket……
Other sessions at the conference focused on other unknowns about solar geoengineering beyond weather. Little research has been conducted into how ecosystems would respond to prolonged global dimming. Some researchers also worry that spraying sulfur dioxide into the high stratosphere could damage the ozone layer, though recent research has suggested this risk is smaller than once thought…….
Al Gore: We’re working around Donald Trump on climate change, DW, 8 Aug 17 The former vice president turned environmental activist says that the US will stick to the Paris Agreement despite Donald Trump’s opposition. He also accused the current president of censoring scientific information.
The 69-year-old environmental activist was in Berlin to preview “An Inconvenient Sequel,” a follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming. Citing the axiom from physics that “for every action there is an equal counter-reaction,” Gore said that Trump’s election had galvanized and energized environmentalists in the US.
“The good news is that we are working around [Trump],” Gore said. “The US is going to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement, regardless of what Trump says or does or tweets. He has isolated himself.”
Gore added that the majority of Republican voters in the US think that the country should have stayed in the Paris agreement. In perhaps the most unlikely scene in the film, Gore visits the Republican mayor of a town in the most conservative part of Texas, which had just completely gone over to using renewable energy sources. And that’s not the only example of Americans acting locally.
“In his speech on June 1, President Trump said that he was elected to represent Pittsburgh and not Paris,” Gore related with a smile. “And the next day the mayor of Pittsburgh said ‘Well, we’re still in the Paris Agreement.'”……
The former vice president took the current US president to task for suppressing scientific evidence and accused him of blocking a report, drawn up by scientists every four years, which concluded the earth is already feeling the effects of human-caused climate change. Excerpts from a draft of the report, which was leaked to the New York Times newspaper, were published on Monday.
A CONTROVERSIAL draft report on climate change that contradicts claims made by Donald Trump’s administration on global warming has been leaked. A DAMNING report on climate change that contradicts claims made by Donald Trump’s administration on global warming has been leaked, as scientists fear the President may suppress it.
“Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now,” the report said according to The New York Times, which acquired a draft copy of the report by scientists from 13 federal agencies.
The report says extreme heatwaves have become more common and extreme cold waves have less common since the 1980s. It says emissions of greenhouse gases will affect the degree to which global temperatures continue to rise — a claim President Trump and some members of his cabinet have disputed. One scientist cited anonymously by the Times says he and other researchers are worried that the Trump administration, which must approve the report’s release, will suppress it.
The report “directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain and that the ability to predict the effects is limited,” the Times said.
“How much more the climate will change depends on future emissions and the sensitivity of the climate system to those emissions,” a draft of the report states.
The report is part of the National Climate Assessment, which is carried out every four years, The New York Times reports. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft and is awaiting permission from the Trump administration for it to be publicly released.
The report also found that we would still experience at least 0.30 degrees Celsius of warming over this century compared with today, even if we put a stop to greenhouse gas emissions.
A small increase in global temperatures can lead to prolonged heatwaves, storms and the breakdown of coral reefs. The report found that surface, air and ground temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic are warming twice as fast as the global average.
“It is very likely that the accelerated rate of Arctic warming will have a significant consequence for the United States due to accelerating land and sea ice melting that is driving changes in the ocean including sea level rise threatening our coastal communities,” the report states.
The United States just announced Friday it would still take part in international climate change negotiations in order to protect its interests, despite its planned withdrawal from the Paris accord on global warming. Two months after President Trump announced the United States would abandon the 2015 global pact, his administration confirmed it had informed the United Nations of its “intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement” — a process that will take at least until 2020.
The United States is the world’s second biggest producer of greenhouse gases after China and its withdrawal was a seen as a body blow to the Paris agreement.
The accord commits signatories to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, which is blamed for melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels and more violent weather events.
They vowed steps to keep the worldwide rise in temperatures “well below” two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times and to “pursue efforts” to hold the increase under 1.5 degrees Celsius
Under guidance from the agency’s director of soil health, Bianca Moebius-Clune, a list of phrases to be avoided includes “climate change” and “climate change adaptation”, to be replaced by “weather extremes” and “resilience to weather extremes”.
Also blacklisted is the scary locution “reduce greenhouse gases” – and here, the agency’s linguists have done an even better job of camouflage: the new and approved term is “increase nutrient use efficiency”.
The effectiveness of this approach – based on the well-known principle that what you can’t say won’t hurt you – has previously been tested at the state level, making use of the “policy laboratories” provided by America’s federalist system.
In 2012, for instance, the North Carolina general assembly voted to prevent communities from planning for sea level rise. Early analysis suggests this legislation has been ineffective: Hurricane Matthew, in 2016, for instance drove storm surge from the Atlantic ocean to historic levels along the Cape Fear river. Total damage from the storm was estimated at $4.8bn.
It is true that the next year “unprecedented” coral bleaching blamed on rising temperatures destroyed vast swaths of the state’s reefs: from Key Biscayne to Fort Lauderdale, a survey found that “about two-thirds were dead or reduced to less than half of their live tissue”. Still, it’s possible that they simply need to increase their nutrient use efficiency.
At the federal level, the new policy has yet to show clear-cut success either. As the say-no-evil policy has rolled out in the early months of the Trump presidency, it coincided with the onset of a truly dramatic “flash drought” across much of the nation’s wheat belt.
As the Farm Journal website pointed out earlier last week: “Crops in the Dakotas and Montana are baking on an anvil of severe drought and extreme heat, as bone-dry conditions force growers and ranchers to make difficult decisions regarding cattle, corn and wheat.”
In typically negative journalistic fashion, the Farm Journal reported that “abandoned acres, fields with zero emergence, stunted crops, anemic yields, wheat rolled into hay, and early herd culls comprise a tapestry of disaster for many producers”.
Which is why it’s good news for the new strategy that the USDA has filled its vacant position of chief scientist with someone who knows the power of words.
In fact, Sam Clovis, the new chief scientist, is not actually a scientist of the kind that does science, or has degrees in science, but instead formerly served in the demanding task of rightwing radio host (where he pointed out that followers of former president Obama were “Maoists”). He has actually used the words “climate change” in the past, but only to dismiss it as “junk science”.
Under his guidance the new policy should soon yield results, which is timely since recent research (carried out, it must be said, by scientist scientists at MIT) showed that “climate change could deplete some US water basins and dramatically reduce crop yields in some areas by 2050”. But probably not if we don’t talk about it. Bill McKibben is the founder of the climate campaign 350.org.
Not all glaciers in Antarctica have been affected by climate change https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-08/gsoa-nag080817.phpGEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA Boulder, Colo., USA: A new study by scientists at Portland State University and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder has found that the effects of climate change, which are apparent in other parts of the Antarctic continent, are not yet observed for glaciers in the western Ross Sea coast.
Published online ahead of print for the journal Geology, the study found that the pattern of glacier advance and retreat has not changed along the western Ross Sea coast, in contrast to the rapidly shrinking glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The western Ross Sea is a key region of Antarctica, home to a complex and diverse ocean ecosystem, and the location of several Antarctic research stations including the U.S. McMurdo Station, the largest on the continent.
The research team compiled historic maps and a variety of satellite images (such as https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/2000/2066/seawifs_south_pole_ross_lrg.jpg) spanning the last half-century to examine glacier activity along more than 700 kilometers of coastline. The NASA-U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat series satellites were particularly useful, including the newest Landsat 8 instrument, launched in 2013.
The scientists examined 34 large glaciers for details of ice flow, extent, and calving events (formation of icebergs). Although each glacier showed advances and retreats, there was no overall pattern over time or with latitude.
The results suggest that changes in the drivers of glacier response to climate — air temperature, snowfall, and ocean temperatures — have been minimal over the past half century in this region.
The study was part of a National Science Foundation and U.S. Geological Survey study and was motivated by previous work documenting significant glacier retreat and ice shelf collapse along the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula. The region’s ongoing changes were highlighted recently with the cracking and separation of a large iceberg from the Larsen C Ice Shelf.
Earlier studies had documented little change in the western Ross coastline prior to 1995, and the new study both confirmed the earlier work and extended the analysis to the present time.
This work underscores the complexity of Antarctic climate change and glacier response.
