“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.
Climate change is turning cities into harsh, sweltering hotspotshttp://grist.org/article/climate-change-is-turning-cities-into-harsh-sweltering-hotspots/By Brian Kahnon Aug 5, 2017Tina Johnson has a sense of place. She’s a fourth-generation New Yorker who lives in the same apartment in West Harlem’s Grant housing development that her grandparents lived in. She calls that apartment her anchor, and the nine buildings that make up the development towering above 125th Street — home to roughly 4,400 residents spread across nine high rises — a small town.
“I have fond memories [of here] and this sense of belonging I want my children to have,” she said.
To keep that sense of place is going to take some work, though. Changes outside that “small town” nestled in a city of 8 million will only compound the stresses altering West Harlem..A mix of poverty, a lack of services, and aging infrastructure already make West Harlem one of the most vulnerable communities in Manhattan.
Climate change is putting further stress on Johnson and the 110,000 people that call the neighborhood home. And the biggest threat is rising temperatures.
As carbon pollution turns up the planetary heat, the impact is clearest on what’s happening to extremely hot days: They’re becoming more common and more intense.
New York has averaged three days above 95 degrees F over the past 20 years. If carbon pollution continues on its current trend, by 2075 that number is likely to increase to 31, according to a new Climate Central analysis.
Myriad cities across the country will be far worse off, though. Atlanta is projected to see 69 days above 95 degrees F, Boise could spend 80 days above that threshold, while Dallas is on track to have 140 days above 95 degrees F. Then there’s Phoenix, where residents may have to contend with more than half of the year above 95 degrees F (163 days in case you’re wondering).
Many small towns will suffer even more. Alva, Florida (population 2,182) could see 142 days above 95 degrees F while Salton City, California (population 3,763) could have to cope with a mind-bending 203 days where the mercury tops out at 95 degrees F or higher.
The biggest factor in the number of future hot days is how fast the world reins in carbon pollution today. However, even if emissions are dramatically cut, every place across the U.S. will face more hot weather.
But extreme heat is hardly some far-off problem for 2100. It’s already taking a toll on people and influencing the decisions they make.
For Johnson, living in public housing means paying a surcharge of $18 per month to keep air conditioning in her apartment. Her grandparents didn’t believe in getting an air conditioner both because of the cost and a “tough it out” attitude. Johnson herself used to tease her kids when they complained it was too hot, but she finally relented, especially as warm weather has become more common in New York.
“When I was growing up here, I knew the summer was going to be hot,” she said. “There might be some hot days, but there was a regular pattern of it getting really hot the first weeks of August and then summer would start to peter out. Now it’s harder to predict the weather.”
But because of New York City Housing Authority rules and antiquated wiring, she can only have two air conditioners in her apartment. In hot months, that effectively turns her three-bedroom apartment into a two-room apartment.
Johnson spends her summers sleeping in the living room with her two sons. Her 20-year-old daughter gets a small portable unit to herself and a series of fans to stay cool, but family tensions tend to bubble up more in the summer without enough space for everyone.
Access to adequate air conditioning isn’t just about maintaining family relationships, though. Staying cool can be a matter of life and death. In New York, that heat sends 450 people to the emergency room and kills 121 people directly or indirectly on average each year. A study published last year by Columbia University researchers showed that the city could see 3,331 heat-related deaths by 2080.
It will take more than air conditioning to make West Harlem a safe, habitable neighborhood if carbon pollution continues to rise.
Cutting carbon pollution will help mitigate some of the heat stress, but cities and towns across the country will have to act soon to protect citizens and the infrastructure and services upon which they rely.
New York just unveiled a $100 million plan to kickstart that preparation. It focuses on the most vulnerable areas like Harlem, the South Bronx, and other underserved neighborhoods.
“We know we can’t do business as usual dealing with heat impacts,” Kizzy Charles-Guzman, the deputy director of the New York Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, said. “We need to prepare now.”
There’s a layer of urgency for cities like New York. Summer days in the city are up to 14 degrees F hotter than rural areas due to the urban heat island effect, a byproduct of all the pavement in cities trapping more heat than trees and fields. But there are heat islands within heat islands. Where Johnson lives in Harlem is one of them, underscoring that climate adaptation is as much a social justice issue as one of engineering and infrastructure (it’s also a problem playing out throughout the world).
In Midtown Manhattan, air conditioners keep office buildings cool, but they release heat into the surrounding air. Breezes from the south whisk that air into Harlem and the South Bronx, intensifying the heat island effect there.
For Johnson and thousands of others suffering with limited or no air conditioning, it’s adding injury to insult. A constellation of groups including WNYC public radio and WE ACT, a local environmental justice nonprofit, put together a pioneering study dubbed the Harlem Heat Project last summer. They put thermometers in 30 Harlem residents’ apartments and found that the temperature indoors frequently exceeded the ambient air temperature outdoors, particularly at night.
Building walls throbbed with heat they had absorbed throughout the day, radiating into homes and making sleeping and recovery from the day’s heat near impossible. That puts particular stress on elderly, the young, and the infirm. Those conditions are also partly why Johnson, who has lupus and can’t spend much time outdoors, decided to install air conditioning.
“The communities that will be hardest hit by climate change are already the most vulnerable to environmental pollution and inequity,” Peggy Shepard, executive director of WE ACT, said. “Heat exacerbates asthma, other respiratory problems, and cardiovascular disease.”
“It puts stress on the family and the house,” Johnson said.
To help ease some of the heat, New York’s $100 million plan will cover a host of initiatives, from planting trees and painting roofs white to cut the heat island effect, to connecting neighbors so that the elderly aren’t forgotten when the mercury skyrockets.
The latter idea holds particular promise, as it’s a low-cost program that could achieve major results. Charles-Guzman, the deputy director at the New York Mayor’s Office, said what happened in the wake of Sandy is a textbook example.
“The neighborhoods where everybody knew each other, those neighborhoods did better [with recovery],” she said. “Not everyone wants a city worker knocking on their door. There’s low trust in government. We’re trying to capitalize on social ties people have with their neighbors.”
It’s tempting to peg New York as an outlier. After all, it’s a massive city with a vibrant economy in a deep blue state. But adapting to extreme heat is hardly the purview of rich, liberal cities.
Across the country, cities and towns of all shapes, sizes, and political persuasions are reckoning with increasingly hot weather.
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, a city of 120,000 that sits in the shadows of the Organ Mountains, city planners are preparing residents for the even hotter future that climate change will bring.
At the town’s core is a clutch of low-slung adobe buildings punctuated by acres of parking lots that shimmer in the summer heat. Houses on the fringe of downtown blend with the desert dust and dead lawns that make up their front yards. Beyond that, the city tapers into the desert scattered with ocotillo, yucca, and sagebrush.
The harsh landscape is a product of the sweltering, dry conditions that overtake the southern tier of New Mexico each summer. Even though it’s less dense than New York, trees cover just 4.5 percent of Las Cruces. On days when the temperature tops out above 108 degrees F as it did earlier this summer, that translates to an intense heat island and very little shade for those braving the outdoors. The city is projected to see 64 days above 105 degrees F by 2100, up from just a single day in an average year.
Like New York, Las Cruces is considering how to improve neighborhood awareness as a means to battle more extreme heat. But rather than focusing solely on checking in on neighbors when summer temperatures are at their hottest, city planner Lisa LaRocque said she has a vision to get neighbors helping each other with home repairs that can help keep things cool indoors.
“One of our goals is social cohesion and having neighbors help each other and know each other and create that bonding that might not otherwise occur,” she said. “[One idea is] if we are doing some of the low-hanging fruit of improving energy efficiency, we would do it as a neighborhood cooperative situation where I help you with x and someone else helps me with y.”
About 450 miles to the west of Las Cruces, city planners in San Angelo, Texas, have already glimpsed their future and are weighing how to respond. The city of 100,000 had 100 days above 100 degrees F in 2011, an outlandishly hot year for the city. But that outlandishly hot summer could be routine if carbon pollution isn’t curbed. San Angelo is projected to have 110 days above 100 degrees F by 2100. That’s the equivalent of running from the beginning of May through the end of September with daily temperatures near triple digits (to make matters worse, 39 of those days are projected to top out at 110 degrees F or higher).
That makes the job of city planners in cities like San Angelo that much more important. When AJ Fawver, a city planner, convened a series of meetings to discuss how extreme weather affected basic city functions, managers were skeptical about why they were in the room together.
“Initially, there was a feeling it only affects certain types of people,” Fawver said. “But really it affects everyone. You could see that as we went around the room,” she said, rattling off how firefighters, road crews, utility workers, and even the human resources department found they shared more heat-related woes than they first thought.
Weighing the impacts heat is already having on San Angelo makes the climate projections of what comes next all the more sobering. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe made the three-hour trip down from Texas Tech to talk with the group about what the future holds if carbon pollution isn’t curtailed. The findings painted a picture of relentless heat that will change the way the city functions and people live their daily lives.
“That was a reality check,” Fawver said. “People started thinking about their children and grandchildren and remembering how dreadful that summer was. Then it really hit home.”
San Angelo hasn’t yet decided how to tackle the hotter future that awaits it. But in a county where climate change isn’t a front-burner topic like it is in New York, the conversation is a major first step.
“The idea of climate change is still very controversial for some folks,” said Fawver, who is now the planning director in Amarillo, Texas. “There are people that just don’t want to have that discussion, people that question the science, a whole host of reasons why people want to avoid a conversation. But generally when we try to avoid a conversation, it’s a conversation that’s imperative to have.”
How Congress Is Cementing Trump’s Anti-Climate Orders into Law These efforts are mostly flying under the radar, but they could short-circuit lawsuits and make it harder to restore environmental protections. Inside Climate News, Marianne Lavelle 31 JULY 17,
How NRDC will fight Trump’s attack on our environment.
President Donald Trump marvels at his own velocity when he boasts about dismantling the Obama climate legacy. “I have been moving at record pace to cancel these regulations and to eliminate the barriers to domestic energy production, like never before,” he said at a recent White House event.
But while Trump focuses on speed, his allies in Congress appear increasingly concerned about the durability of the president’s fossil fuel directives.
In recent weeks, they have advanced a handful of legislative measures that echo and extend various presidential orders meant to boost coal, oil and gas production and set aside consideration of climate change.
These moves may seem redundant, but they could provide bulletproof armor during future challenges to Trump’s agenda.
“They are … covering their bases by trying to legislate the rolling back of these safeguards because the process to repeal, undo or rewrite a regulation is as lengthy as the public process that helped establish the standard in the first place,” explained Melinda Pierce, chief lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “And, of course, any attempt to roll back environmental or public health standards can and will be challenged in court.”
“The Trump administration is attacking every environmental and health protection we have,” said Sara Jordan, legislative representative for the League of Conservation Voters. “If these legislative proposals get passed, it will make it that much harder for the next administration to restore environmental protections.”
That’s why Congressional Republicans are racing to write his instructions into law.
“We need to put the legislative stamp of approval on what the Trump administration is doing,” said Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.) during a recent debate on the House floor.
The House already has voted to fast-track Trump’s withdrawal of a clean water rule and to streamline future environmental reviews over cross-border pipelines like Keystone XL. Now, GOP members are pushing forward legislation to bolster Trump’s revival of federal coal leasing, and to bar government regulatory agencies from considering the future damages caused by greenhouse gas pollution.
‘A Very Slippery Slope to Government by Fiat’
The courts have already started chipping away at the Trump administration’s edicts. A federal appeals court ruled July 3 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot simply suspend an Obama-era rule on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. And a federal judge ruled last month that the Army Corps of Engineers had moved too hastily to permit the Dakota Access pipeline project, without considering environmental justice impacts on the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
Environmental groups, states, and tribes have planned or filed lawsuits over virtually every aspect of the Trump energy agenda. “We’re going to meet them in court, we’re going to sue them, and we’re going to prevail,” Mitchell Bernard, chief counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a video the environmental group produced.
But Congress could short-circuit that litigation strategy with measures like the provision passed by the House last week allowing withdrawal of Obama’s “Waters of the U.S.” rule without public notice, comment or any of the other requirements that apply to federal departments and agencies. The Trump administration already has begun rescinding the rule, which was written to protect wetlands from dredge and fill material and created new permitting and reporting requirements that the oil, gas and coal industry abhor. The rider that the GOP tucked into an $800 billion budget bill would hurry the repeal and reduce possibilities for legal challenge……….
These Efforts Are Flying Under the Public Radar
Most of the legislative proposals shoring up the Trump energy agenda originate in the House, and their fate is unclear in the Senate, which already has rejected an effort to undo Obama-era methane regulations by legislative fiat, and where appropriators are less tolerant of budget riders.
Still, Senate negotiators may feel pressured to go along with some provisions to pass budget legislation that would keep the government up and running after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
Senate supporters of the Trump energy agenda already have introduced their own version of the “Ozone Standards Implementation Act” that the House passed on July 18. That bill would help EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt delay implementation of the Obama administration’s standards regulating smog emissions for a year. The House-passed legislation would give states until 2025 to comply with the revised standards and would change long-standing law to allow the EPA to revise the standards every 10 years instead of every five.
Both the NRDC and a coalition of environmental, health and labor groups have published online running tallies of budget provisions that affect regulations, but they lament that the Congressional efforts to cement the Trump agenda have not received attention while the health care repeal effort and Russia investigations crowd out media coverage.
With excessive heat warnings and temperatures reaching the triple digits from northern California through Washington state (places where air conditioning is far from a given), it’s a bit hard to fathom that this week should have been even hotter.
All-time records could have been set up and down the coast, if it hadn’t been for the thick smoke streaming down from more than 100 massive forest fires in British Columbia, about 500 miles north.
This interplay between fire and hot weather has inspired a bleak and eerie feeling for people in this part of the country. As climate scientist Sarah Myhre writes for Seattle’s alternative newspaper, the visceral experience of climate change in the future might feel a lot like it does this week in the Emerald City.
Hot temperatures increase evaporation rates and dry out the soil, resulting in even hotter temperatures. Drier weather makes wildfire more likely, and wildfires in a hot and dry environment can spark pyrocumulus clouds — freak thunderstorms borne literally of the heat of the fires themselves, whose lightning can spark new fires. (This actually happened in northern California on Wednesday.)
It’s no wonder it feels like a sneak peak at the end of the world.
It’s normally fairly dry this time of year from Sacramento to Juneau, but the last six weeks have been exceptional. This summer’s wildfires in British Columbia are the worst in more than half a century. If it doesn’t rain this weekend — and it’s not forecast to — Seattle will set a new a new all-time record for consecutive days without measurable rainfall.
In a normal year, Seattle reaches 90 degrees only three times. In this week’s heatwave alone, Seattle may reach that mark seven days in a row. In parts of southern Oregon, temps rose above 110 degrees this week even despite the smoke. And the latest forecast shows that the smoke might stick around for at least another week.
Overnight lows, in particular, were record warm this week — a classic signal of global warming. The changing atmosphere is effectively becoming a thicker blanket, preventing heat from escaping into space at night, making overnight temperatures warm even faster than daytime highs. That’s a worrying trend for public health.
At 1 a.m. on Thursday morning in Seattle, the temperature was still 77 degrees, equivalent to the average high for this time of the year. Without the smoke, the high on Thursday would likely have breached 100 for just the fourth time since weather records began in Seattle, back in 1894.
A new study out this week projected that, should global carbon emissions continue unchecked, more than 500 million people in South Asia alone could be subjected to heatwaves so intense by the end of this century that they could kill even healthy people that happened to venture outdoors.
That’s exactly what scientists mean when they say climate change could render parts of our planet uninhabitable. This week’s weather, as mild as it is in comparison, is yet another warning sign.
Extreme weather could kill 150,000 people each year in Europe by the end of the century, say scientists. Hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to deadly weather events by 2100, researchers warn, Independent, Andrew Griffin Science Reporter @_andrew_griffin 5 Aug 17 , More than 150,000 people could die as a result of climate change each year in Europe by the end of the century, shocking new research has found.
The number of deaths caused by extreme weather events will increase 50-fold and two in three people on the continent will be affected by disasters, the study – that serves as a stark warning of the deadly impact of global warming – found.
The research by European Commission scientists lays out a future where hundreds of thousands of people die from heatstroke, heart and breathing problems, and flash flooding. It describes a world where droughts bring food shortages, people are at an increased risk of being killed by disease and infection, and the countryside is ravaged by wildfires.
It used historical records of extreme weather events and combined them with projections of the damage of climate change and changes in the population to project how, where and who will die from the effects of global warming.
In what they say is a “much needed wake-up call” to governments across the continent, campaign groups insisted that action is needed now to avoid being responsible for deaths across the world.“This is a stark warning showing why we need greater action on climate change fast,” said Friends of the Earth campaigner Donna Hume. “People across the globe are already dying due to extreme weather events and without concerted action this will get worse, including right here in Europe.
“This fate can be avoided but only if governments get serious about making the switch away from dirty fossil fuels. Three quarters of existing coal, oil and gas has to remain unused if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change – so why is the UK Government intent on digging and drilling for more across the British countryside?
“It’s time to ditch plans for fracking and new coal mines and instead invest in the renewable energy revolution.”……….
Yearly deaths could soar 50 times from 3,000 between 1981 and 2010 to 152,000 between 2071 and 2100, the research published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health found.Most of those people will die from heatwaves, which could cause 99 per cent of all weather-related deaths. Fatalities will surge from 2,700 per year now to 151,500 each year by 2071.
Such catastrophic global warming will hit the UK too, killing people at a similar rate. By 2080, up to 7,500 Britons could be dead from heatwaves, cold snaps and flooding.“With a one-in-three chance of record rainfall in England and Wales each winter, flooding is the most significant impact of climate change in the UK,” said Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven. “And yet the Government’s own advisers have warned that ministers have no coherent plan to deal with this threat…….
But much of the danger will come in southern Europe, where almost everyone will be affected by weather-related disasters.The study looked at the impact of the seven most dangerous forms of extreme weather events: heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, river and coastal floods and windstorms, in the 28 EU member states as well as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. Researchers analysed 2,300 disasters records from between 1981 and 2010 and combined them with projections of how climate change will progress and what it will do to populations.
Scientists found one reduction in deaths: the number of people killed by cold snaps. But that was only a small reduction and was clearly not enough to outweigh any of the other dangers.
And they said that 10 per cent of the risk would come from developments other than climate change, such as population growth, migration and urbanisation.
The caution comes as a deadly heatwave dubbed “Lucifer” spreads across Europe. Authorities in several countries have issued health warnings and temperatures have been registered as high as 47C, fanning dozens of forest fires in Italy, France, Spain, Macedonia and Albania. ……
Trump falls flat with climate change retreat, Markets, not politics, drive energy sector’s push to cut greenhouse gas emission Ft.com by: Ed Crooks, 7 Aug 17, US Industry and Energy Editor On Friday, the US state department submitted a notification to the UN that the administration intended to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement reached in 2015. The statement, confirming the decision that President Donald Trump announced in June, is at one level momentous. The world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is quitting a deal that the governments of leading European countries have described as “a vital instrument for our planet”. In terms of the consequences for the global energy industry, however, its impact has so far been negligible.
Of course, the full implications have yet to play out. But in the nine weeks since Mr Trump announced that leaving the agreement would be “a reassertion of America’s sovereignty”, energy companies around the world have been making plans that suggest their views on the outlook have not changed in any significant way.
The most important reason for that is that moves towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions are going with the grain of energy markets, regardless of political decisions. The plunging costs of renewable power and electricity storage, the rise of electric cars, the availability of cheap gas for power generation, and the prospect of abundant supplies of oil, for a while at least, all point towards investment decisions that would curb emissions.
The comments from oil companies reporting earnings over recent weeks have provided a stark illustration of that point. For years, environmental groups have been raising concerns about stranded assets: projects that cannot be viable in a world where greenhouse gas emissions are constrained.
When they first started making that argument, with oil at about $100 per barrel, it was often a tough sell, says Andrew Grant of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which has pioneered analysis in this area. Now, he adds, they are “pushing at an open door”.
The central idea is that in a world where fossil fuel consumption is curtailed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, investment in high-cost assets is likely to be wasted………..
Whatever happens to international climate policy in the aftermath of Mr Trump’s decision, unless some other shock comes along to shake the industry out of its current mindset, downward pressure on costs and caution on investment decisions are likely to remain the prevailing rules. https://www.ft.com/content/2f687cfe-7abb-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928
Trump files notice to withdraw from Paris deal, plans instead to promote fossil fuels, REneweconomy, By Mark Hand on 7 August 2017 ThinkProgress The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations of its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Friday, explaining that the United States instead plans to work with countries to help them gain access to fossil fuels……..
The goal of expanding access to fossil fuels is part of Trump’s new “energy dominance” agenda where his administration will work with fossil fuel companies to turn the United States into an oil, natural gas, and coal exporting powerhouse.
The administration also wants to continue to export fracking technology developed in the United States to other countries.
The letter sent to the United Nations has no legal weight nor does it begin the process of withdrawing the United States from the pact of nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather, it is a political document that affirms Trump’s proclamation in June that the Paris agreement is a bad deal for the nation, the New York Times reported Friday.
According to the terms of the Paris agreement, no country can begin the withdrawal process until three years after the agreement enters into force and the withdrawal would not take effect for one year after that date.
The Paris agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016. Therefore, the United States cannot fully withdraw until November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election.
The next president could decide to rejoin the agreement if Trump does not win a second term………
Since June, the California legislature voted to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program until 2030. The U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted several climate and energy resolutions advancing renewable energy, committing to sustainable infrastructure development, and standing by the Paris agreement.
A network of cities, states, businesses, and colleges have united to declare “We Are Still In,” and provide a platform for local leaders to support the commitments of the Paris agreement.
Catastrophic climate change all but unavoidable; now what?, UW study finds little chance of keeping temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius, Seattle PI, By Stephen Cohen, August 3, 2017
Seattle is suffering through its worst heat wave of the year, but according to a recent University of Washington study, increasingly hotter temperatures — and their deadly outcomes — are all but unavoidable.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take steps to try and slow down the rising thermometer.
The UW study, co-authored by statistics and sociology professor Adrian Raftery and associate professor of atmospheric sciences Dargan Frierson, concluded there is a 90 percent chance the Earth’s average temperature will rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
Limiting a rise to less than 2 degrees was one of the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement due to the potentially catastrophic effects of such an increase, including heat waves, extreme storms, flooding, sea level rise, etc. But the study, published on July 31 in the journal “Nature Climate Change,” found there is a less than 5 percent chance that the goal will be met, and only a 1 percent chance the increase will be limited to 1.5 degrees.
“If we’re to keep anywhere close to the 2-degree limit, we basically need to pull out all the stops on all registers over the next 80 years,” Raftery told SeattlePI. “I don’t see any alternative.”
The study used 50 years of data on three input factors — world population, gross domestic product per person and carbon intensity — to determine a range of possible outcomes. Only one of the three (carbon intensity, or the amount of carbon needed for a constant amount of economic production) is realistically subject to policy or societal influence. Carbon intensity has been decreasing at a fairly steady rate for years, and by 2100 it may have gone down by about 90 percent, but the incremental improvement doesn’t seem to be enough.
“If we’d gotten started seriously earlier — say, back when climate change was first identified as a major issue in the 1980s — then I think we could be a bit further along than we are now,” Raftery said.
You don’t have to look too far into Washington’s past to see what even a small rise in temperature might do to the state. The winter of 2014-15 featured above-average temperatures, which led to a “temperature-driven drought,” according to Jeff Marti of the Washington Department of Ecology.
The state got a normal amount of precipitation, but warmer temperatures turned what would have been mountain snowpack into rain, which washed down rivers and out into Puget Sound instead of remaining in the mountains. When temperatures rose in the spring and summer, there was little snowpack to melt into rivers and increase the volume of water while simultaneously lowering temperatures……
One reaction would be to say, ‘Too bad, we’re going to miss the 2-degree target,’ so we kind of throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do,” Raftery said. “But I think that’s exactly the wrong message to take away from the study. The more warming it is, the worse the consequences, and that makes it even more urgent to to take urgent action to at least limit temperature increase to be as close to 2 degrees as possible.”
Melting glaciers in Swiss Alps could reveal hundreds of mummified corpses, Frozen bodies of couple who vanished 75 years ago among those uncovered recently as global warming forces ice to retreat, Guardian, Philip Oltermann and Kate Connolly, 5 Aug 17, Swiss police say hundreds of bodies of mountaineers who have gone missing in the Alps in the past century could emerge in coming years as global warming forces the country’s glaciers to retreat.
Alpine authorities have registered a significant increase in the number of human remains discovered last month, with the body of a man missing for 30 years the most recent to be uncovered.
Rescue teams in Saas Valley in the Valais canton were called last Tuesday after two climbers retreating from an aborted ascent spotted a hand and two shoes protruding from the Hohlaub glacier…….
The discovery comes less than a week after the bodies of a Swiss couple, missing for 75 years, were found in the Tsanfleuron glacier in the same canton…….
Switzerland’s glaciers have been melting at an unprecedented rate, losing almost one cubic km in ice volume or about 900 bn litres of water over the past year. According to an investigation by Tagesanzeiger newspaper, eight of the 10 months in which the glaciers have lost the most in volume over the past century have been since 2008.
Since 1850, when glaciers covered 1,735 sq km (670 sq miles) of Swiss land, the total area has shrunk by a half, to about 890 sq km.
Police in Valais expect the bodies of many more missing persons to emerge because of global warming. “It’s quite clear,” a spokesman, Christian Zuber, told the Guardian.
The first article discusses the idea of injecting sulfur into the stratosphere, which would cause an artificial reduction of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere, according to the article in Science.
This process is similar to the massive release of sulfur into the stratosphere by large volcanic eruptions. Significant, short-term global cooling has been recorded shortly following some of these eruptions.
Stratospheric aerosol modification (SAM) may be used as a last-resort option to reduce the severity of global warming. However, SAM technologies are presently not developed.
Cloud seeding
Another climate engineering method that was discussed in the Science issue is cirrus cloud seeding.
High, wispy and thin cirrus clouds typically do not reflect a lot of solar radiation back into space. Cirrus clouds emit less long wave radiation back into space than a clear sky does, which is similar to what greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide do.
Image courtesy of Science and ETH Zurich, Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science.
