lossdoom rcvr

3/17

new cat

see matthew efx

see FAIL, WIN

hope

leverage

see cascade

unintended

arctic sea level rise

bak 1119

aha hmmn // Brazil buffer flips to emitter?! i had not thought of wildfire as factor in deforestation (it grows back?)

https://grist.org/climate/arctic-fires-released-more-carbon-in-two-months-than-scandinavia-will-all-year/

8/20

Almost exactly a year ago, we reported that June and July wildfires in the Arctic had released as much carbon as Belgium does in an entire year — an unprecedented summertime burn that would amplify the region’s climate change–fueled fever. But everything, apparently, is worse in 2020, including the climate toll of this year’s Arctic fires, which makes 2019 seem like a warm-up.

8/20

https://www.ecowatch.com/human-society-collapse-deforestation-2646869167.html

Deforestation coupled with the rampant destruction of natural resources will soon have devastating effects on the future of society as we know it, according to two theoretical physicists who study complex systems and have concluded that greed has put us on a path to irreversible collapse within the next two to four decades, as VICE reported.

The research by the two physicists, one from Chile and the other from the UK, was published last week inNature Scientific Reports. The researchers used advance statistical modeling to look at how a growing human population can cope with the loss of resources, mainly due to deforestation. After crunching the numbers, the scientists came up with a fairly bleak assessment of society's chance of surviving the climate crisis.

"Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10 percent in most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse," the authors write in the study abstract.

From all the issues that the climate crisis raises like rising sea levels, increases in extreme weather, drought, flooding, and crop failures, scientists zeroed in on deforestation since it is more measurable right now. They argue that forest density, or its current scarcity, is considered the cataclysmic canary in the coal mine, according to the report, as The New York Post reported.

"Many factors due to human activity are considered as possibly responsible for the observed changes: among these water and air contamination (mostly greenhouse effect) and deforestation are the most cited. While the extent of human contribution to the greenhouse effect and temperature changes is still a matter of discussion, the deforestation is an undeniable fact," the authors write.

The authors note that the current rate of deforestation would mean that all forests would disappear within 100-200 years.

"Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut down," the authors write, as the Daily Mail reported.

The trajectory of such rapid resource use to supply a rapidly growing human population would result in the loss of planetary life-support systems necessary for human survival, including carbon storage, oxygen production, soil conservation and water cycle regulation, according to the Daily Mail.

In the absence of these critical services, "it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without [forests]" the study points out. "The progressive degradation of the environment due to deforestation would heavily affect human society and consequently the human collapse would start much earlier," they write, as VICE reported....The numbers the researchers look at highlight the extent of human greed. Prior to human civilizations, the earth was covered by 60 million square kilometers of forest. As deforestation has ramped up, the new paper points out that there are now less than 40 million square kilometers of forest remaining.

"Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization," the paper concludes, as VICE reported.

The model developed by the physicists depicts human population growth reaching a maximum level that is undermined by the shrinking of forests, which will not have enough resources left to sustain people. After this point, "a rapid disastrous collapse in population occurs before eventually reaching a low population steady state or total extinction … We call this point in time the 'no-return point' because if the deforestation rate is not changed before this time the human population will not be able to sustain itself and a disastrous collapse or even extinction will occur," the authors write, according to VICE.

Of course, as with every theoretical paper, there are limitations. The paper assumes that some measurements (such as population growth and deforestation rate) will remain constant, which is certainly not guaranteed. Forest is also taken as a proxy for all resources, which could be seen as too simplistic, as IFLScience noted.

The authors point out that it will take a massive amount of collective action to reverse direction and save our society from collapse ...

no lnx

Human Activity Is Making Forests Shorter and Younger, Study Finds ... ›

Fighting Poverty Can Also Fight Deforestation, New Study Finds ... ›

Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's ... ›

To Stop Amazon Deforestation, Brazilian Groups Take Bolsonaro to ... ›

Chances Of Societal Collapse In Next Few Decades Is Sky High ... ›

deforestation climate crisis science forests

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-could-add-3-metres-sea-level-rise

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

By Charlotte HartleyJul. 23, 2020 , 11:30 AM

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in more danger of collapsing than previously thought, National Geographic reports. The ice sheet is the world’s largest, holding 80% of the planet’s ice. But some 400,000 years ago, a large chunk about the size of Arizona collapsed into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise by more than 3 meters. The worrying thing is that this happened during a period of relatively mild warmth, according to a study published yesterday in Nature. And it could happen again.

At the time of the previous collapse, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached about 300 parts per million (ppm). It now stands at 400 ppm. The researchers say this has caused them to re-evaluate the perceived “invincibility” of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and seriously consider the possibility of it shrinking. These findings are consistent with estimates of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting elsewhere on the continent and around the world.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/new-methane-leak-found-in-antarctica-raises-alarm-as-planet-edges-closer-to-climate-tipping-points/

Scientists have for the first time identified an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica, increasing the possibility that the planet is close to one of the “tipping points” that would put the impacts of global heating out of humans’ control.

According to The Guardian,GUK researchers led by Andrew Thurber at Oregon State University foundguk the methane leak in a region known as Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound, within the Ross Sea. The site is 30 feet below the surface of the ocean.

In addition to finding methane dissolved in the water there, the scientists found that microbes which usually consume the gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only formed in small numbers five years after they first began to study the site.

Thurber called the findings “incredibly concerning.”

“It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor,” he told The Guardian. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about.”

Scientists have warned for years that the climate crisis could lead to the “tipping point” of methane leaks in the sea floor and the thawing of permafrost regions.

“At some point in a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions from nature will go way beyond anything we can control,” tweeted Australian immunologist Peter Doherty.[twt guk]

the Ross Sea has not yet warmed significantly from the climate crisis, so the research did not directly link the methane leak to global heating.

But climate models have not yet accounted for significant delays in the development of microbes, which help to keep methane from leaking into the atmosphere.

“The big question is: how large is the lag [in microbe development] compared with the speed at which new leaks of methane might potentially form in the wake of retreating ice?” Prof. Jemma Wadham of the University of Bristol in the UK, who reviewed the study, told The Guardian.

Thurber called the discovery of the methane leak and the delayed microbe growth “a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”

“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctic has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” he said in astatement.

Other tipping points identified by climate scientists include the disintegration of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, “dieback” in the Amazon which would transform the rainforest into a dry ecosystem, and the dying off of the coral reefs.

Scientists raised alarm earlier this year aboutunusually warm water beneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, and researcherswarned in February that the third major bleaching event in five years at the Great Barrier Reef would put the reef “on a knife edge.”

===

guk 6/20

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/01/sixth-mass-extinction-of-wildlife-accelerating-scientists-warn

no lnx

ixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn

Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century

The age of extinction is supported by

About this content

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington

Mon 1 Jun 2020 15.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 1 Jun 2020 15.37 EDT

Sumatran rhino

The Sumatran rhino is on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 individuals left. Photograph: Rhett Buttler/Mongabay/PA

The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation.

More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In comparison, the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Without the human destruction of nature, even this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years, the scientists said.

The land vertebrates on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 individuals left, include the Sumatran rhino, the Clarión wren, the Española giant tortoise and the harlequin frog. Historic data was available for 77 of the species and the scientists found these had lost 94% of their populations.

The researchers also warned of a domino effect, with the loss of one species tipping others that depend on it over the edge. “Extinction breeds extinctions,” they said, noting that unlike other environmental problems extinction is irreversible.

Humanity relies on biodiversity for its health and wellbeing, scientists said, with the coronavirus pandemic an extreme example of the dangers of ravaging the natural world. Rising human population, destruction of habitats, the wildlife trade, pollution and the climate crisis must all be urgently tackled, they said.

Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life

“When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system,” saidProf Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University in the US, and one of the research team. “The conservation of endangered species should be elevated to a global emergency for governments and institutions, equal to the climate disruption to which it is linked.”...

===

icn 5/20

50 Years From Now, Many Densely Populated Parts of the World Could be Too Hot for Humans

BY: BOB BERWYN

Unless steps are taken to check global warming, up to 3 billion people will find themselves in areas too warm for human comfort, a new study finds.

4/27/20

aha sys fail insanity: no brainer to stop subsidizing ?! banks keep loaning $ to frack tho NEVER MADE A PROFIT?! NOW GOV'T BAILOUT HAMM ETP KELCY; EXXON AND CHEVRON LOOKING TO BANKRUPT SMALL INDEP [THAT DJT CLAIMS TO CARE ABOUT] BUY UP ASSETS CHEAP METHANEWHICH ARE FRYING THE PLANET; MEANWHILE COVIS DEMOS FAIL OF LIBTARD, WE HAVE WINDOW GND, WAY CHEAPER THEN CLEAN UP COVID MESS WHICH HIT US B/C WE TAKE OUT HABITAT AND EAT WILD ANIMALS

icn 420

super-Polluting Methane Emissions Twice Federal Estimates in Permian Basin, Study Finds

BY: PHIL MCKENNA

The methane is a byproduct of fracking for oil, often burned off at well heads or emitted into the atmosphere instead of being captured for use as fuel.

covid bail bill

cf antonia juhaz bakken bailout? oil -40$ bakken, 200b$ debt; in 2008 oil 150$, many poor cty could not afford, helped trigger Gt Recession?

https://www.ecowatch.com/southwest-drought-climate-crisis-2645742986.html

A severe drought that has engulfed the American Southwest since the year 2000 is likely to soon be the most severe drought since the 800s, according to a new study published in Science.

"This appears to be just the beginning of a more extreme trend toward megadrought as global warming continues," the authors wrote in the study.

A team of researchers from Columbia University conducted the study. They described the ongoing dry spell, which has helped intensify wildfire seasons and threatened water supplies for people and agriculture, as an "emerging megadrought," according to The New York Times.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. By comparison to the previous 19 years, 2019 was actually a fairly wet year. Unpredictable climate variability may also bring enough rain to the region to end the drought, but global warming boosts the chances that the drought will endure.

"We know that this drought has been encouraged by the global warming process," said lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, as The New York Times reported. "As we go forward in time it's going to take more and more good luck to pull us out of this."

Scientists have suspected for a while that that the dryness is evolving into a megadrought. The new research not only confirms their suspicion, but also concludes this megadrought may be as bad or worse than anything known before.

"We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts," said Williams, in a statement, as USA Today reported. This is "a drought bigger than what modern society has seen."

The researchers say that man-made global warming caused about half of this drought. Changes in the climate have contributed to dwindling reservoirs and harsher wildfire seasons.

It all could get much worse.

"Anthropogenic global warming and its drying influence in (southwestern North America) are likely still in their infancy," the study warns, as CNN reported. "The magnitude of future droughts in North America and elsewhere will depend greatly on future rates of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions globally."

...

ew 420 record?!

https://www.ecowatch.com/greenland-ice-melt-2645742998.html

===

doomsday clock 100 secs 1st time, nukes and climate combo!

pentagon Deploys 1st Low-Yield Nuclear Warhead-Armed Submarine

an 220

On a knife edge’: Experts warn of new signs the Great Barrier Reef is at severe risk Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams

FAIL

https://www.ecowatch.com/juliana-v-united-states-tossed-2644863188.html

An appeals court tossed out the landmark youth climate lawsuit *Juliana v. United States* Friday, arguing that the courts are not the place to resolve the climate crisis.

The three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the 21 young plaintiffs that the U.S. government had actively contributed to climate change by supporting a fossil-fuel based economy and that the young people had been injured by its actions, The Guardian explained. However, the majority ruled that the courts did not have the power to order a plan for government action to address the crisis, as the 12-to-23-year-old plaintiffs had requested.

"Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power," Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz wrote in the court's opinion. "Rather, the plaintiffs' impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government."

[twt]

The decision raises the question of where young people can turn to ensure their futures are protected.

"The idea that their only recourse is to go to the very branches of government that are violating their rights when half of them can't even vote is a preposterous notion," the young people's lead lawyer Julia Olson told The New York Times.

In her dissent, Judge Josephine L. Staton agreed, criticizing her colleagues for "throw[ing] up their hands."

"Where is the hope in today's decision?" she wrote. "Plaintiffs' claims are based on science, specifically, an impending point of no return. If plaintiffs' fears, backed by the government's own studies, prove true, history will not judge us kindly. When the seas envelop our coastal cities, fires and droughts haunt our interiors, and storms ravage everything between, those remaining will ask: Why did so many do so little?"

The lawsuit was filed in 2015 by the 21 plaintiffs with the support of the nonprofit Our Children's Trust, according to Climate Liability News. It argues that by supporting a fossil-fuel based economy despite evidence it was contributing to climate change, the federal government violated the public trust and the young plaintiffs' constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.

For example, plaintiff Levi Draheim, 12, has had to repeatedly evacuate his home in Satellite Beach, Florida because of more extreme storms, according to The Guardian. Jaime Butler, 19, has been separated from her home and relatives in Navajo Nation because of water insecurity.

The federal government has tried to dismiss the case several times since it was filed, according to Climate Liability News. And Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark told The New York Times that the government was "pleased with the outcome" of Friday's decision.

However, Our Children's Trust and the plaintiffs have vowed to keep fighting and to ask the full Ninth Circuit to review the decision, the group announced in a press release.

"We will continue this case because only the courts can help us," Draheim said. "We brought this lawsuit to secure our liberties and protect our lives and our homes. Much like the civil rights cases, we firmly believe the courts can vindicate our constitutional rights and we will not stop until we get a decision that says so."

If the full Ninth Circle refuses to hear the case, the group would then have to appeal to the Supreme Court, Climate Liability News explained.

Supreme Court Puts Historic Youth Climate Lawsuit on Hold ... ›

not my aha but maybe related to inequality = --> // polarization:

redmap did systemic long term damage TP--> freedom cocks, suicide squad, unaccountable old white guys --> voter suppression, anti-abortion ...

amplified and accelerated polarization

So yes, it worked. But it also contained the seeds of the party’s unraveling, placed a frustrated and impossible-to-please base in charge, and set the stage for an outsider to sweep up the pieces four years later...

As the nation changed, redistricting not only held back demographic change, but it turned back the clock and solidified conservative white power. As Lizza concluded, “these 80 members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”

Boehner, given little choice, followed the “suicide caucus” over the cliff. Predictably, disaster ensued and he had to change course. And predictably, the “suicide caucus” saw no reason to compromise or change its own. This was just one of more than four dozen battles to repeal Obamacare in the House, none of which stood any greater likelihood of victory.Immigration reform, one of the only policy options the autopsy’s authors saw as crucial for the party’s future, stood no chance in this climate.

Neither did the GOP leadership. A year later,Meadowswould turn on Boehner, filing a parliamentary motion to “vacate the chair” that would ultimately lead to the speaker’s resignation.

The House had been set on a dangerous new course. REDMAP, like some Frankenstein’s monster, would not only devour Boehner, but the new members empowered by these toxic, technology-driven gerrymanders would accelerate all of the worst polarizing trends in our politics. The Freedom Caucus, legislators created and empowered by REDMAP, would run the House. Ryan, Boehner’s successor, would later step aside in frustration as well, proven ineffective despite GOP control of Congress and the White House. The autopsy wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on. The GOP establishment hoped that controlling redistricting would buy themselves time to set a new course. Instead, the party’s course, and our nation’s history, would beset by the new leaders that their gerrymandering rendered unbeatable and uncontrollable.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-decade-republicans-hijacked-our-democracy-via-the-gerrymander/

yikes OMFG note models not good at tip pt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20

dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST

Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.

“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances.“Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.

The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”

In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfiresand ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.

How we know that global warming is real]

The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.

That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.

The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.

This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’slosses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.

“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."

Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which haslong stored massive amounts of carbonin its frozen soil.

At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.

“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."

While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.

The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.

The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.

Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.

In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.

Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon.Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.

Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.

"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”

The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.

In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.

Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.

For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”

Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.

The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.

"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.

Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.

“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.

In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.

Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.

“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/potential-for-sudden-and-extreme-change-new-climate-report-warns-a-feedback-loop-may-already-be-underway/

arctic

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/new-iucn-report-on-ocean-oxygen-loss-gives-ultimate-wake-up-call-to-act-on-climate/

no lnx

New IUCN report on ocean oxygen loss gives ‘ultimate wake-up call’ to act on climate

Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams December 8, 2019

A new report on ocean oxygen loss released Saturday should serve as the “ultimate wake-up call” to take bold action to rein in planet-warming emissions and save the world’s “suffocating seas,” researchers said.

The publication from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) shows how the problem known as ocean deoxygenation, driven by global warming and human-caused nutrient pollution, is expanding, with impacts on humans and marine ecosystems alike.

“With this report, the scale of damage climate change is wreaking upon the ocean comes into stark focus. As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray,” said IUCN acting director general Dr. Grethel Aguilar.

Representing the expertise of over five dozens scientists across 17 countries, the report is framed as “the largest peer-reviewed study conducted so far on ocean deoxygenation.”

Driving the problem is climate change, both directly, as oxygen is less soluble in warmer waters, and indirectly by affecting ocean dynamics. Deoxygenation is also being fueled by nutrient pollution, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, from sewage, agriculture, and aquaculture. Those factors are summed up in an infographic from IUCN:

Infographic on deoxygenation from IUCN

A four-minute video entitled “A Breathless Ocean” released by the IUCN explains the process further:

The researchers found that from 1960-2010 overall ocean oxygen reserves fell by 2%, and they say the level could drop by as much as a further 7% by 2100.

While there were just 45 ocean sites around the world with low oxygen conditions in the 1960s, 700 such sites now exist. The number of areas in the global ocean depleted of oxygen, or anoxic waters, has quadrupled, the report found.

That’s bad news, because changes in oxygen levels mess with species distribution. Species like jellyfish want low-oxygen areas, but low-oxygen sensitive ones, including most fish, don’t.

Those species are then driven to other areas not affected by deoxygenation, but that can leave them susceptible to over-fishing by commercial operations.

Humans dependent on the affected species, especially smaller-scale fisheries, are adversely impacted. Communities may have a reduced catch or are forced to spend more to obtain the affected species—impacts that threaten not only nutrient loss but cultural loss.

“We are now seeing increasingly low levels of dissolved oxygen across large areas of the open ocean. This is perhaps the ultimate wake-up call from the uncontrolled experiment humanity is unleashing on the world’s ocean as carbon emissions continue to increase,” said report co-editor Dan Laffoley, the principal advisor on Marine Science and Conservation for IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Program.

“To stop the worrying expansion of oxygen-poor areas,” said Laffoley, “we need to decisively curb greenhouse gas emissions as well as nutrient pollution from agriculture and other sources.”

That points to action global leaders must commit to right now as they attend COP 25.

According to Minna Epps, IUCN Global Marine and Polar Program director, “Decisions taken at the ongoing climate conference will determine whether our ocean continues to sustain a rich variety of life, or whether habitable, oxygen-rich marine areas are increasingly, progressively, and irrevocably lost.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-is-aligning-the-us-military-with-the-russian-white-supremacist-criminal-syndicate/

no lnx

How Trump is aligning the US military with the Russian white supremacist criminal syndicate

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly December 8, 2019

Whether you’re a fervent nationalist or citizen-of-world internationalist, this story should inspire some alarm:

Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military.

While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view is changing, most notably among the households of military members.

The second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, found nearly half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as ally.

Overall, the survey found 28% of Americans identified Russia as an ally, up from 19% the previous year.

So a significantly larger portion of the military–nearly half!–sees Russia as an ally than does the general public. If your first reaction is that this is part of a tribalistic Trump effect on a constituency that leans conservative overall, you would be right.

Generally, the pollsters found the positive views of Russia seemed to be “predominantly driven by Republicans who have responded to positive cues from [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump about Russia,” according to an executive summary accompanying the results.

While a majority, 71% of all Americans and 53% of military households, still views Russia as an enemy, the spike in pro-Russian sentiment has defense officials concerned.

It’s easy to sound the alarm over this for basic national security reasons. From a traditional Westphalian perspective, it is clearly dangerous for the people we entrust to secure the country’s self-defense to be much more favorable to our fiercest geopolitical foe than the public. It should be the other way around. It is beyond alarmingwhen put in the proper context: one of the country’s two major political parties was just assisted in the previous election by its greatest foe; the president who was elected by a minority of voters with that rival’s help has continued to run interference for that rival, has been weirdly obsequious to its dictatorial leader, has refused to accept his own intelligence services’ findings about the criminal theft of opposition documents in the election, and is to this day extorting and undermining a nation in a hot war with that same rival power in an effort to fabricate dirt on a political rival for the next election and, amazingly, to frame the victim of the extortion for the crimes of its rival aggressor.

The president has embroiled his personal lawyer, his Attorney General, his Vice President and his Secretary of State in the conspiracy as well. And all of this is occurring even as the president rules under a cloud of suspicion about his own personal and business financial ties to the same rival power.

And now, due to purely partisan interests, the nation’s military is being warped into supporting the hostile foreign power–against our own values, geopolitical interests, and intelligence services It’s like the plot from a bad spy novel, except that it’s happening right out in the open. This is the situation as it stands between Trump, Russia, the Republican Party and Ukraine. And no one can do anything about it because the Republican Party sees itself as locked into a demographic death spiral as it sheds support from every demographic except the declining share older, white, exurban evangelicals, and is therefore willing to defend even the most abominable behavior in exchange for nominating a slew of extremist radical judges who they hope will derail any progressive priorities for the next several decades.

But even this understates the cause for alarm.Because Russia isn’t just a geopolitical foe: it is also the global leader of white supremacy and fossil fuel kleptocracy. It is an international criminal syndicate operating as a government, and it is actively recruiting allies and henchmen all around the world. As I said last year,it’s not so much that the United States lost or is losing the Cold War (we didn’t lose it), as much as that racist plutocrats won it:

In order to pacify the populace during this process, Putin and allies used the standard timeless conservative tactics: they allied themselves with rural and socially conservative religious elements, ramped up hostile rhetoric toward supposedly corrupt outsiders, leveraged racist and sexist sentiments against domestic minorities and women’s rights groups, and portrayed themselves as the only ones who could make Russia great again.

It was unsurprising, then, that a Russian government aligned with racist, sexist and plutocratic principles would find an easy friend in Donald Trump and the American Republican Party. They are natural allies. It is less that America became Russia’s client state, than that the conservative movements in both America and Russia made a semi-secret criminal global compact that neither could acknowledge publicly. Since Trump’s election, their wealthy patriarchal white supremacist movement has sought and encouraged allies in Britain, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, seeking to align the world against socially inclusive economic progressivism in favor of plutocratic ethnonationalism.

The American white supremacist movement has long looked to Russia and Putin as friends and allies.They see Western Europe as engaged in destruction of the white race through liberal immigration policies, of male dominance through embrace of feminism, of rural fossil fuel power through embrace of policies designed to fight climate change, and of conservative Christianity through cultural secularization. They see America as destined to follow along on the same path, and they see Russia (as well as a few former Eastern Bloc countries like Poland and Hungary) as the only major world power to be moving in the other direction, asserting the privileges of wealth, patriarchy, orthodox fundamentalism, and fossil fuel extraction industries. There is nothing they would like better than for an America in a conservative counterrevolution to abandon NATO and align wholeheartedly with Putin. Trump’s hostility to Merkel and Macron is seen as a feature, not a bug: his subservience to Putin an advantage.

In this sense, Trump is not just pushing the military toward favoring a rival nation-state that is actively sabotaging our own for his own personal and political benefit. He is attempting to align the military with a global white supremacist, patriarchal fossil fuel-backed mafia syndicate. It’s almost certain that he is also hoping that in a Constitutional crisis pitting Western secular liberal values against said syndicate, that the military will help overthrow democracy itself on the syndicate’s behalf.

We aren’t there yet. But another four years of Trump in the White House could have very dark consequences for the entire world. It can happen here.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27112019/climate-tipping-points-permafrost-forests-ice-antarctica-greenland-amazon-nature

Humans are playing Russian roulette with Earth's climate by ignoring the growing risk of tipping points that, if passed, could jolt the climate system into "a new, less habitable 'hothouse' climate state," scientists are warning ahead of the annual UN climate summit.

Research now shows that there is a higher risk that "abrupt and irreversible changes" to the climate system could be triggered at smaller global temperature increases than thought just a few years ago. There are also indictations that exceeding tipping points in one system, such as the loss of Arctic sea ice, can increase the risk of crossing tipping points in others, a group of top scientists wrote Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

"What we're talking about is a point of no return, when we might actually lose control of this system, and there is a significant risk that we're going to do this," said Will Steffen, a climate researcher with the Australian National University and co-author of the commentary. "It's not going to be the same conditions with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It's a cascading process that gets out of control."

The scientists focused on nine parts of the climate system susceptible to tipping points, some of them interconnected:

Arctic sea ice, which is critical for reflecting the sun's energy back into space but is disappearing as the planet warms.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea level 20 feet if it melts.
Boreal forests, which would release morecarbon dioxide (CO2) than they absorb if they die and decay or burn.
Permafrost, which releases methane and other greenhouse gases as it thaws.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key ocean current, which would shift global weather patterns if it slowed down or stopped.
The Amazon rainforest, which could flip from a net absorber of greenhouse gases to a major emitter.
Warm-water corals, which will die on a large scale as the ocean warms, affecting commercial and subsistence fisheries.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would raise sea level by at least 10 feet if it melted entirely and is already threatened by warming from above and below.
Parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that would also raise sea level significantly if they melted.

Just looking at Arctic changes shows how the links between parts of the climate system susceptible to tipping can amplify global warming and its effects, said Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at Exeter University and an author of the commentary.

Shrinking sea ice increases ocean heat because it no longer reflects as much of the sun's energy back to space and it enables the darker water to absorb more warmth. The ocean heat extends over land and, combined with other heating effects, thaws permafrost, which releases more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, Lenton said.

Research shows that melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet may also be slowingtheAtlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key Atlantic Ocean current that transports heat between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and directs rainfall around the planet. That could disrupt monsoon rains critical to agriculture in developing countries.

"If you transfer less heat from south to north, it warms up the Southern Hemisphere, which affects the Antarctic ice sheets. When you start thinking about this, heading to a new climate state becomes very plausible indeed," he said.

The ocean circulation slowdown was documented in a 2015 study by researchers including Michael Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf, a co-author of the new commentary. Cold water from the melting Greenland Ice Sheet is likely slowing the current, showing "how these tipping point responses are actually interrelated, not independent," Mann said. "If one goes early then so too may the others, like dominoes."

Lack of Policy Urgency as Permafrost Thaws

Despite increasingly urgent warnings about the effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions, two new reports published this week by the United Nations show that international efforts to slow global warming are falling far short of what scientists recommend.

The Emissions Gap Report—an annual assessment of global pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions—shows that countries' current pledges under the Paris climate agreement will still raise global temperatures 3.2°C (5.8°F) by the end of the century, well beyond the Paris goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C (3.6°F). The Production Gap Report shows that the amount of oil, gas and coal that countries already plan to produce will lead to 50 percent more fossil fuels produced by 2030 than would be allowable to stay under 2°C warming.

The Earth is now warming faster and CO2 levels "are increasing at rates that are an order of magnitude higher than at the end of the last ice age," when rapid climate change destabilized the climate quickly, the scientists wrote in the Naturecommentary.

"To err on the side of danger is not a responsible option," they wrote.

long, cont....]

GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

no lnx

'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures likeSteve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."

1119

invert yield curve; homewreckers book 8 mil foreclosures; big % llc shell corps; // CDO; R wolff says banks can't deal with hit 1/2 of Gt Recession , get loans to cover loans; mnuchin etc wilbur recalled gov't baillout after S&L; mnu sez put 1.x billion but pain nothing for indybank and then got subsidies to foreclose?! // get car for free, put some bucks in then pocket total profit 11/8/19

1119

iran ups centrifuge

:{NYT:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:: Major U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arms Treaty Could Expire Without Being Replaced

Study confirms fear that intense ocean acidification portends ecological catastrophe: ‘We have been warned’Julia Conley / Common Dream

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/heres-the-dark-side-of-billionaire-philanthropy-and-the-threat-to-american-democracy/

no lnx

Here’s the dark side of billionaire philanthropy — and the threat to American democracy

Anthony Quintano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Written by Independent Media Institute October 15, 2019

by Tom Conway

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, America’s fourth-richest person, finally admitted that no one deserves to accumulate as much wealth as he has.

But hey, he says, at least he plans to give a lot of his $69.6 billion net worth to charity.

That’s nice. But it’s not enough considering the threat of concentrated wealth to the American ideal.

America’s very democracy is dying because billionaires like Zuckerberg amass ever more wealth—and thus ever more political power—while everyone else struggles with less—less money, but, just as importantly, less clout in government.

Philanthropy is fine. But to preserve a functioning democracy, everyone, including billionaires, must pay a fair share of taxes so that America has the money it desperately needs to address shared priorities, reinvigorate the middle class and repair the social fabric torn by income inequality. And we need real limits on campaign contributions to stop the nation’s slide from democracy, where many have a voice, to oligarchy, where only the rich are heard.

The rich don’t pay anything like their proportionate share of taxes right now. Not even close.

In fact, a new study shows that the super-rich pay a lower rate than working Americans thanks to the Republicans’ 2017 tax giveaway.

Last year, the nation’s 400 richest families paid an average effective tax rate of 23 percent, compared to the 24.2 percent paid by the bottom half of U.S. households. It turns out hotel queen Leona Helmsley was right all those years ago when she said only the little people pay taxes.

In 1960, the tax rate for America’s 400 richest families was 56 percent. By 1980, it had dropped to 47 percent. As the tax rate for those families fell between 1960 and last year, the middle class shrank, income inequality rose to a 50-year high and the rich consolidated political power through unchecked political contributions.

It’s a vicious cycle. Rich people use their money to hijack the political process and pass laws, such as the 2017 tax windfall for the rich, that give them still more money to push their agenda at the expense of middle-class priorities like stronger Social Security and Medicare.

The few are ruling the many. Make no mistake, American democracy is under attack from within.

During a company town hall meeting, a Facebook employee asked Zuckerberg about the morality of being a billionaire. Zuckerberg said no one “deserves” to accumulate the vast wealth that he has, but he quickly pointed out that he gives much of it away.

Better that rich people donate some of their money than blow it all on waterfront mansions, mega-yachts and sports cars for themselves. And philanthropy can fund important research and social service projects.

But it’s dangerous for a small group of rich people to decide which issues get attention and buckets of cash. This just enhances their status and power.

In a functioning democracy, everyone gets a voice in these kinds of decisions through proper representation and taxation. Taxes are an obligation for the common welfare. Everyone contributes a fair share so that the pool is big enough for the people—through their duly elected representatives—to address shared priorities, from national defense to public schools.

For example, with funds from equitable taxation of all people—rich and not rich—Americans might decide to overhaul their roads, bridges, tunnels, locks and dams. Their condition right now is a national disgrace. A major tax investment in infrastructure would generate family-sustaining jobs—something that would pump up the decimated middle class—and keep commerce flowing.

Some of the additional tax money also could be spent on programs to help Americans struggling to pay for college and health care. Or it might be used to provide food stamps for the poor.

Right now, to save $4.5 billion, the Trump administration wants to kick nearly 8,000 households off of food stamps and reduce benefits to thousands more. Yes, Trump intends to short-change the poorest of the poor after helping the super-rich dodge their tax obligations. But that’s what happens when the rich control the political process.

America’s political system, ideally, is based on a one person, one vote principle. That means each voter possesses the same political clout as every other.

But Americans don’t have an equal voice. And they will never get a just tax policy as long as the rich can buy whatever political policy they want with unchecked campaign contributions and loads of lobbyists. The U.S. Supreme Court gave the rich this gift—the power to spend unlimited amounts on campaign ads and use corporations to inject unlimited dark money into politics. The rich have used piles of money to muffle individuals, even large groups of individuals.

The relationship is transactional. The rich give Republican politicians the money they need to win elections. And then Republicans pass laws benefiting their benefactors and block laws for the 99 percent.

Just look at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a hike in the minimum wage.

The House this past summer passed a bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, up from the current poverty-level wage of $7.25 an hour. It would be the first increase since 2009. It’s urgently needed to help counter decades of general wage stagnation for American workers.

Kentucky, McConnell’s home state, had the nation’s sixth-highest poverty rate—16.9 percent—last year, and lots of Kentuckians would benefit from a minimum wage bump. But McConnell won’t bring the bill to the floor. Wealthy employers told him they don’t want it.

Similarly, the power of the 1 percent is the reason that far fewer workers will receive overtime pay than deserve it.The Obama administration proposed extending overtime eligibility to all workers making $47,476 a year or less. The cut-off had been $23,660. But wealthy business groups protested the Obama number, won a court decision that the Republican Trump administration declined to appeal, and now Trump’s Labor Department has reduced the overtime number to $35,568. That means 8 million fewer workers will benefit. Great for wealthy business owners who don’t have to pay. Not so great for those who do the work.

Zuckerberg knows lack of equal representation is a problem. Last year, he gave $200 million in Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which asserts: “A healthy democracy is dependent on all community members influencing public policy decisions that affect their lives and neighborhoods.”

Zuckerberg’s charity isn’t going to make that true nationwide, however. Americans must change the system corrupted by big money.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

yikes

Climate Change Threatens Two-Thirds of North American Bird Species With Extinction

yikes, indicator species? it's all types

'Bird emergency’ declared as study reveals North American population has plunged in less than 50 years

Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/terrifying-new-climate-models-warn-of-6-7c-of-catastrophic-warming-without-drastic-action/

no lnx

‘Terrifying’ new climate models warn of 6-7°C of catastrophic warming without drastic action

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 18, 2019

New climate models unveiled by French researchers Tuesday showed Earth’s average temperature could rise a “terrifying” 6.5-7.0°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century if dramatic action is not immediately taken to slash carbon emissions.

The findings, presented at a press conference in Paris, suggest theplanet may be warming significantly faster than scientists previously believed as the world’s major economies continue to burn fossil fuels at unsustainable rates.

“Unfortunately, our global failure to implement meaningful action on climate change over recent decades has put us in a situation where what we need to do to keep warming to safe levels is extremely simple,” Joeri Rogelj, an associate professor at Imperial College London, told AFP. “Global greenhouse gas emissions need to decline today rather than tomorrow, and global CO2 emissions should be brought to net zero.”

The new models are expected to form part of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, which is set to be published in 2021. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014, presented a worst-case scenario of five degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.

Olivier Boucher, head of the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modeling Center in Paris, which developed one of the new models, said the latest data provide a better look at where the climate is heading without drastic changes to global energy production.

“We have better models now,” Boucher told AFP on Tuesday. “They have better resolution, and they represent current climate trends more accurately.”

Bloomberg reported that just “one of the updated climate models used by the researchers allowed for the global temperature increase to remain below 2°C by the end of the century.” That model assumed global carbon neutrality by 2060.

The worst-case scenario of 6.5-7.0°C of warming assumed continued economic expansion driven by growth of fossil fuel production.

Megara9

@Meg9Time

That 2.5 degree global temperature increase that was predicted to happen this century has been revised to 6.5-7 degrees. This is not good. https://phys.org/news/2019-09-earth-quickly-climate.html …

Earth to warm more quickly, new climate models show

Greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels are warming Earth's surface more quickly than previously understood, according to new climate models set to replace those used in...

phys.org

The IPCC warned last year that even limiting planetary warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, would not prevent many of the disastrous effects of the climate crisis. Warming of 6.5-7.0°C would be catastrophic.

“Higher warming would allow less time to adapt and mean a greater likelihood of passing climate ‘tipping points’ such as thawing of permafrost, which would further accelerate warming,” said Boucher.

In an email to Common Dreams, Penn State University climate scientist Michael E. Mann sounded a note of caution about the dire scenarios predicted by the new models.

“Some earlier versions of the models appeared to underestimate climate sensitivity somewhat,” said Mann, “and I suspect that some of these more recent versions are actually over-estimating it a bit.”

“I suspect, when all is said and done, we’re probably looking at something in the range of 3-4°C and no higher, at least for near-term warming,” Mann added. “If we allow the warm[ing] to persist for centuries, then other long-term positive feedbacks (vicious cycles) could kick in, giving us substantially more warming.”

919

good

This week, in TIME magazine, journalist-turned-climate-activist Bill McKibben describes how the world could look by mid-century if the collective we confront climate change head-on in the next few years.

While we’re not “getting out of this unscathed,” McKibben describes paths forward after 2020 that are just as potentially politically achievable as doing nothing or not doing enough.

McKibben’s vision of the positive and possible is a welcome change from recent, despairing climate forecasts by public intellectuals — from David Wallace-Wells’ book “The Uninhabitable Earth” to Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending” (that “the climate apocalypse is coming”) in The New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending

What If We Stopped Pretending?

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

By Jonathan Franzen September 8, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/books/review-uninhabitable-earth-life-after-warming-david-wallace-wells.html

More than halfway through “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells addresses the reader directly, commending anyone who has “made it this far” for being “brave.” After all, the previous pages of his book have depicted in meticulous and terrifying detail the possible future that awaits the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope.

Wallace-Wells is a deputy editor of New York magazine, where two years ago he published an article on climate change that went viral, understandably so; in 7,000 eloquent words, he bluntly laid out the calamitous costs of doing nothing — or, perhaps more realistically and therefore more menacingly, of doing something but not enough....

new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life. The crumpled carcass of a bee on the cover tells you only some of what you need to know. Yes, apian death gets passing mention, but Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.

There’s plenty of science consulted here, but the book, he writes, isn’t about the science of warming: “It is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill more. All this could come with 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the threshold that world leaders pledged to stay below in the Paris accords of 2015.

Yet Wallace-Wells insists he’s optimistic; and in fact, he obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.”

Books about global warming have sounded the alarm for some time, with classic texts from writers like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben chronicling the ways in which humans have irrevocably transformed the climate. The science is “tentative, ever-evolving,” Wallace-Wells writes, but “none of it is news.”

Imag

“The Uninhabitable Earth” seems to be modeled more on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” — or, at least, it’s a bid to do for greenhouse gases what Carson’s 1962 book did for pesticides. “Silent Spring” became a galvanizing force, a foundational text for the environmental movement. The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”

Part of his strategy is to tell us how much we have already lost. “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,” he writes. Some of the technology we rely on to make the effects of climate change more bearable, like air-conditioning, also worsens them. The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.

Wallace-Wells avoids the “eerily banal language of climatology” in favor of lush, rolling prose. The sentences in this book are potent and evocative, though after a while of envisioning such unremitting destruction — page upon page of toddlers dying, plagues released by melting permafrost and wildfires incinerating tourists at seaside resorts — I began to feel like a voyeur at an atrocity exhibition. His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?

“Fear can motivate,” Wallace-Wells writes. He’s aware of those who denounce the graphic doomsaying as “climate porn,” but he arrived at his own ecological awakening when he started to collect “terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives” about climate change. He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too.

Besides, it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes.What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.”

In the course of writing this book, even while staring down the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.”...

Australia Cuts Outlook for Great Barrier Reef to ‘Very Poor’ for First Time icn 919

nb this does not even refer to amplif fdbk

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-moves-to-accelerate-climate-change-and-its-even-more-evil-than-it-first-appears/

no lnx

Trump moves to accelerate climate change — and it’s even more evil than it first appears

Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly August 29, 2019

Methane levels in the environment have been rising sharply since 2008, and there is probably more than one contributing factor. A lot of methane is trapped under ice sheets which are melting at a rapid pace. But some researchers see the new popularity of fracking as a prime culprit.

The boom in the US shale gas and oil may have ignited a significant global spike in methane emissions blamed for accelerating the pace of the climate crisis, according to research.

Scientists at Cornell University have found the “chemical fingerprints” of the rising global methane levels point to shale oil and shale gas as the probable source…

…Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up…

…“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”

Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it exists in smaller quantities and dissipates more quickly in the atmosphere. It’s actually easier to make headway against climate change by reducing methane rather than carbon dioxide emissions, but that requires strict regulation of the shale gas fields where methane is released both intentionally and unintentionally during the hydraulic fracturing process. In 2016, the Obama administration sought to do this by announcing new rules.

The new rules are part of the Obama administration’s goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent by 2025. They affect newly-drilled hydraulically fractured oil wells, which studies show are significant sources of leaking methane. At least one-third of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and gas industry.

The regulations require companies to find and contain leaks with the goal of reducing methane pollution by the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2025, or roughly the same as the emissions from 2.34 million passenger cars.

The EPA is beginning work on regulating methane leaks from existing oil and gas wells by requiring energy companies to provide data to the agency under an “information collection request.” The request will require the companies to inform the EPA about their emissions and technology they could use to stop methane leaks.

Since 2016, climate scientists have been revising their estimates of the pace and severity of climate change, and the problem today looks more severe than their worst-case scenarios from three years ago. This would support revisiting the Obama administration’s rules on methane and fracking to see if they should be strengthened. But that’s not what the Trump administration is doing:

Oil and gas companies would face looser controls on emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups say.

The government’s plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for methane leaks and plug them.

This plan is actually even more evil than it might first appear, as the Washington Post reports:

Just as important, according to an EPA document obtained by The Washington Post, the proposal will challenge the agency’s earlier position that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate climate pollutants in the future, including in a recently-finalized rule curbing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

They want to free up frackers to release as much methane into the environment as they want, but they also want to make it harder for any future administration to reverse their decision. To get an idea of how truly egregious this step is, consider that the oil and gas industry isn’t uniformly behind it.

The [EPA] estimates the proposed changes, which will be subject to public comment for 60 days after they are published, would save the oil and natural gas industry between $17 million and $19 million a year.

But several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place. Collectively, these firms account for 11 percent of America’s natural gas output.

Since the industry has already adapted to the Obama Era rules, there’s really no reason to eviscerate them. But it seems that this administration will pursue almost anything if it’s a bad enough idea.

LOSS anonaly vs ct 2 but not so state scotus?

819 ew

A Nebraska court has granted a victory to the owner of the Keystone XL pipeline, removing one of the last major challenges in the project's way.

The state's Supreme Court on Friday ruled unanimously that the state's Public Service Commission had acted in the public interest in approving an alternate route for the pipeline in November 2017. Challengers to the project say that the approval of an alternate route did not include appropriate input from landowners and tribes, who filed a motion with environmental groups to intervene.

"The Nebraska decision to approve the KXL route is not a surprise, but we had hoped they would be courageous to protect the earth, water, and wishes of the indigenous people and our allies," Yankton Sioux member Faith Spotted Eagle said in a statement released by 350.

...

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/13/humanitys-destruction-oceans-nearly-doubled-over-decade-scientists-warn-and-could

Humanity's impact on global oceans nearly doubled in a just over a decade and could double again soon without urgent and sweeping international action, warns a study published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports.

"We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

—Ben Halpern, study lead author

To determine the pace of change in cumulative human impacts on the world's oceans, researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University combined annual data from 2003 to 2013 on 14 human stressors and how they affected 21 marine ecosystems.

The team found that over the 11 years, 59 percent of the ocean experienced a significant increase in cumulative impact, "in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution, and shipping." Human impact significantly decreased for only five percent of the ocean.

"Impacts of human activities on the ocean have been shown to be substantial, ubiquitous, and changing," the study says, pointing to both existing uses of global oceans and emerging ones such as offshore energy production, aquaculture, and undersea mining. "The resulting cumulative impact of these activities often leads to ecosystem degradation or even collapse."

Researchers determined that during the analyzed period, "nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk." However, some regions saw high impacts and are at greater risk for ecosystem collapse: the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Canadian Eastern Seaboard, Southern Atlantic Ocean, and Southern/Western Australia.

With the new study, the team aimed to provide "aholistic perspective of where and how much human activities shape ocean change—for better or worse—which is essential to policy and planning," according to a statement from UC Santa Barbara announcing the research.

"If you don't pay attention to the big picture, you miss the actual story," said lead author Ben Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. "The bigger picture is critical if you want to make smart management decisions—where are you going to get your biggest bang for your buck."

The apparent accelerating pace of human impacts on oceans around the world "creates even more urgency to solve these problems," Halpern added. "We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

As the study explains:

Despite these sobering results, messages of hope remain. During this time period, many countries, particularly in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, saw notable declines in impacts from commercial fishing, and many countries saw reduced impacts from land-based pollution. In a few cases, these declines were larger than increases in climate change and other stressors, leading to overall decreases in [cumulative human impacts] , and in all cases the declines helped mitigate increases.

"Coordinated, comprehensive management that accounts for multiple stressors can leverage decreases in single stressors," the study continues, noting that "results indicate that climate mitigation to meet targets of the Paris agreement would have major positive impact on the condition of marine ecosystems."

Co-author Melanie Frazier, a data scientist at NCEAS, pointed to the accelerating rate at which oceans are warming—because of global heating fueled by human activity—as a motivator for swift international action.

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem," she said. "I think this study, along with many others, highlights the importance of a concerted global effort to control climate change."

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem."

—Melanie Frazier, study co-author

The research was released just a week before United Nations delegates are scheduled to meet for the third time in less than a year to discuss "conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction."

In an op-ed published Monday by The Hill, Mark Abbott of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Chris Scholin of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute wrote that "so far, these negotiations have had a critical omission: the vast stretch of ocean known as the twilight zone" that spans from 660 to 3,300 feet deep.

"With the twilight zone, we have an opportunity to transform how humanity relates to little known—yet potentially indispensable—ecosystems and resources," they argued. "The ocean's midwater is remote enough that it has mostly remained shielded from human impacts. We do not have to make another mistake of epic proportions and find ourselves trying to repair the damage done by overexploitationwhen it is already too late."

...“That requires reversing the course of the U.S. in dismantling arms control agreements and proceeding — along with Russia — to develop ever more lethal and destabilizing weapons systems; and in not only refusing to join the world in trying to do something about the severe environmental crisis but even aggressively seeking to escalate the threat, a form of criminality with literally no historical antecedent,” he said.

Unfortunately, both those prospects look particularly dismal at the moment. The United States’ trade war with China is emblematic of its failure to come together in an aggressive way to address climate change, especially after President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. And National Security Adviser John Bolton has been successfully pushing for the United States to pull out of arms control agreements and it is now believed that Russia is working on building nuclear-powered cruise missiles— to disastrous effect. At least until Trump is out of office — and perhaps not even then — it’s difficult to see how the United States will get its act together regarding these global threats.

“Not easy,” Chomsky said of reversing course, “but it can be done.”

He continued: “There have been other severe crises in human history, even if not on this scale. I’m old enough to remember the days when it seemed that the spread of fascism was inexorable — and I’m not referring to what is referred to as fascism today but something incomparably more awful. But it was overcome.”

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html

aug 12, 2019

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction.

The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations.

The rules also make it easier to remove a species from the endangered species list and weaken protections for threatened species, a designation that means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

Overall, the new rules would very likely clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the new rules would modernize the Endangered Species Act and increase transparency in its application. “The act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” he said in a statement Monday.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement the revisions “fit squarely within the president’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.”

The new rules are expected to appear in the Federal Register this week and will go into effect 30 days after that.

Environmental groups denounced the changes as a disaster for imperiled wildlife. A recent United Nations assessment, they noted, has warned that human pressures are poised to drive one million species into extinction and that protecting land and biodiversity is critical to keep greenhouse gas emissions in check.

Climate change, a lack of environmental stewardship and mass industrialization have all contributed to the enormous expected global nature loss, the United Nations report said.

...Ever since President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law 1973, it has been the main United States legislation for protecting fish, plants and wildlife, and acted as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction. The peregrine falcon, the humpback whale, the Tennessee purple coneflower and the Florida manatee all would very likely have disappeared without it, scientists say.

Republicans have long sought to narrow the scope of the law, saying that it burdens landowners, hampers industry and hinders economic growth. Mr. Bernhardt wrote in an op-ed last summer that the act places an “unnecessary regulatory burden” on companies.

They also make the case that the law is not reasonable because species are rarely removed from the list. Since the law was passed, more than 1,650 have been listed as threatened or endangered, while just 47 have been delisted because their populations rebounded.

Over the past two years Republicans made a major legislative push to overhaul the law. Despite holding a majority in both houses of Congress, though, the proposals were never taken up in the Senate. With Democrats now in control of the House, there is little chance of those bills passing.

The Trump administration’s revisions to the regulations that guide the implementation of the law, however, mean opponents of the Endangered Species Act are still poised to claim their biggest victory in decades.

One of the most controversial changes removes longstanding language that prohibits the consideration of economic factors when deciding whether a species should be protected.

Under the current law, such determinations must be made solely based on science, “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of determination.”

Gary Frazer, the assistant director for endangered species with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said that phrase had been removed for reasons of “transparency.” He said the change leaves open the possibility of conducting economic analyses for informational purposes, but that decisions about listing species would still be based exclusively on science.

Environmental groups saw a danger in that. “There can be economic costs to protecting endangered species,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. But, he said, “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species.”

The new rules also give the government significant discretion in deciding what is meant by the term “foreseeable future.” That’s a semantic change with far-reaching implications, because it enables regulators to disregard the effects of extreme heat, drought, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change that may occur several decades from now.

When questioned about that change and its implications in the era of climate change, Mr. Frazer said the agency wanted to avoid making “speculative” decisions far into the future.

Among the animals at risk from this change, Mr. Caputo listed a few: Polar bears and seals that are losing crucial sea ice; whooping cranes whose migration patterns are shifting because of temperature changes; and beluga whales that will have to dive deeper and longer to find food in a warmer Arctic.

Jonathan Wood, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has represented landowners in opposing endangered species designations, said he believed the changes would improve the law by simplifying the regulatory process and making the law less punitive.

“It’s a shift away from conflict in favor of more collaboration and cooperation,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html

aha: ok maybe not tip pt but certainly inflection points:

see doom tip pt, along with 2010 TP wave, ripple cascade effects bad.

dereg presumably started with RR mandate of L, hit list. Bush 41n not dereg wacko (tho John Graham OIRA DQA?)

Newt 1994 wave forced triangulation?

hmmn, NAFTA, welfare , omnibus crime? etc before shellacking midterms, only

In 1999 he signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act also known as theGramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which repealed the part of the Glass–Steagall Act that had prohibited a bank from offering a full range of investment, commercial banking, and insurance services since its enactment in 1933.^[139] andCommodities Futures Modernization Act

after?

Koch TP libtards favors dereg, zombies killed all climate bills, bush 43 ran on ghg then 180 2001? 2010 shellacking Obama midterm, he got only CA, CPP reversed by 90 day scam only used 1x before bush 43 ~ OSHA ergonomics --> opioids, see below. what else dereg post 2010 TP? (massive rollback DJT 2016 post)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-deregulation-led-to-the-opioid-epidemic

no lnx

The opioid abuse epidemic is one of the worst public-health crises in American history. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1999 and 2017, almost 400,000 people died in the U.S. from an overdose of either prescription or illicit opioids. In 2017 alone, opioids, more than one-third involving prescriptions, killed more than 47,000 individuals. And today, on average 130 people die each day from opioid overdoses.

This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The root cause of most cases of opioid addiction, particularly prescription-initiated addiction, is pain, a devastating but sometimes overlooked symptom. As a recent American Industrial Hygiene Association paper argues, “the opioid crisis should be seen primarily as a pain crisis, much of which is related to work.” Addressing that crisis precipitated another: treatment regimes that relied heavily on opioids. Today there’s little awareness that almosttwo decades ago, conservative members of Congress, in a burst of anti-regulatory zeal, championed the fight to eliminate the very ergonomics standard that was designed to reduce the high incidence of a number of common workplace injuries.

The tale of that misguided effort begins with the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, following decades of unregulated, preventable workplace deaths, injuries, and illnesses. Its goal was to “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women” and included “authorizing enforcement of the standards developed under the Act.”

The act incorporated existing industry safety standards and adopted new ones to cover an array of workplace hazards, such as work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). These disorders included a wide range of conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, back pain, and tendonitis that are related to repetitive stress, or sustained or sudden exertions resulting from lifting, pushing, and pulling; carrying many or irregularly shaped objects; maintaining awkward or unnatural positions; or handling vibrating machinery and tools.

By the 1980s, labor health and safety activists recognized that alarming rates of disabling WMSDs were occurring in a wide variety of workplaces, including auto manufacturers, garment factories, office environments, and meatpacking and poultry plants. New modes of assembly line production exacerbated these long-standing problems. The need to implement an ergonomics standard, one that would require employers to systematically address the hazards that give rise to musculoskeletal injuries suffered by their workers, became even more urgent.

There were several false starts for the controversial provisions, but OSHA began working in earnest on the standard in 1993. However, the resulting proposals soon ran into trouble on Capitol Hill. The Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” heralded the new Republican majority’s deregulatory push. Bemoaning the costs that an ergonomics standard would entail for the private sector, industry lobbyists derided OSHA’s ergonomic proposal as the poster child for government overregulation. The agency estimated that the new rule would require $4.5 billion in annual compliance costs, but would generate $9.1 billion in benefits every year in the first ten years, and prevent hundreds of thousands of musculoskeletal disorders each year.

Gingrich’s acolytes fought the development of the standard tooth and nail, despite a 1997 General Accounting Office report that found that “billions of dollars are spent by private sector employers on workers’ compensation claims associated with WMSDs,” and that “employers can reduce these costs and injuries and thereby improve employee health and morale, as well as productivity and product quality” by implementing effective ergonomics programs in their workplaces.

After a decade of research and heated political debate,OSHA finally prevailed. On November 14, 2000, during the final weeks of the Clinton administration, the agency issued its ergonomics regulation. It applied to more than six million worksites covering 102 million workers and required all general-industry employers (excluding the agriculture, maritime, and construction sectors) to establish an ergonomics program if triggered by reports of a worker’s WMSD or persistent evidence of WMSDs in the workplace.

The standard went into effect days before George W. Bush was inaugurated. But a few months later, Congress used the Congressional Review Act of 1996 to obliterate the regulation, the first and only time the act had been used to rescind an agency regulation (until President Trump began to make frequent use of it). Usually, if a new administration dislikes a regulation and wants it revised or revoked, it needs to engage in rulemaking all over again and must justify the desired changes. The ergonomics standard escaped this process. In his first legislative act as president, Bush signed the rescission resolution on March 20, 2001, taking the standard off the books and prohibiting OSHA from ever issuing a substantially similar one. A regulation designed to protect workers from debilitating workplace injuries—that frequently required painkilling treatment regimes—had been completely destroyed.

The Bush administration paid lip service to the value of ergonomics programs. Administration officials noted that employers who ignored obvious problems with WMSDs might be cited under OSHA’s “general duty” to provide a workplace reasonably free from recognized hazards. But, as a June 2004 memo to OSHA’s regional administrators made clear, any new guidelines for the prevention of WMSDs “are not new standards or regulations and do not create any new OSHA duties for employers” (emphasis in original). Today, no federal ergonomics regulation exists. (Some states run their own OSHA programs, with federal financial and technical assistance and oversight. They are required to provide worker protections at least as vigorous as federal OSHA regulations require. Of these states, only California has specific ergonomics regulations currently on the books.)

But the hazardous workplace conditions that give rise to musculoskeletal injuries, and the chronic pain that so often accompanies those injuries, haven’t gone away. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, musculoskeletal injuries are the most prevalent occupational injury in the United States today, totaling, in 2017, 32 percent of serious nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses. The CDC, meanwhile, continues to claim that “together, employers, workers, and other parties with an understanding of ergonomics can design effective programs to prevent and minimize WMSDs.”

In 2017, there were344,970 cases of workplace musculoskeletal injuries involving days away from work.How many of those cases represent workers who are being treated or are self-medicating with opioids today? How many are addicted? And how many of their injuries could have been prevented with an effectively enforced standard designed to reduce the hazards that cause WMSDs, like the short-lived 2001 rule?

Today, the CDC points out that the best ways to prevent opioid overdose deaths include improving prescribing through revamped clinical-practice guidelines and treatment and preventing opioid use disorder. But there’s little discussion even now about preventing the workplace injuries that cause the pain that contribute to opioid use and abuse. Federally enforceable worker-informed ergonomics programs continue to be urgently needed in every workplace where these hazards exist. If only Congress and President Bush had understood that 18 years ago.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/KtbxLxGPqcmVCfTVnCTTMZMFzGDgqrNngB?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1

Trajectories of the Earth System in

the Anthropocene

Will Steffena,b,1, Johan Rockström

, Katherine Richardsonc

, Timothy M. Lentond

, Carl Folkea,e, Diana Livermanf

Colin P. Summerhayesg

, Anthony D. Barnoskyh

, Sarah E. Cornella

, Michel Crucifixi,j, Jonathan F. Dongesa,k,

Ingo Fetzera

, Steven J. Ladea,b, Marten Schefferl

, Ricarda Winkelmannk,m, and Hans Joachim Schellnhubera,k,m,1

Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved July 6, 2018 (received for review June 19, 2018)

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary

threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and

cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing

the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past

1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine

the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the

resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Col-

lective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a

habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere,

climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere

carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and trans-

formed social values....

trump faLLOUT: fail doom tip pt

https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html

The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being clear cut so rapidly — a rate of three football fields per minute — that it is approaching a "tipping point" from which it will not recover,according to the Guardian.lnx]

As trees are lost, researchers said there is a risk that large areas could transition from rainforest to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall from evaporation and from plants giving off watervapor, according to Newsweek.

A transition on that scale could have significant implications for global warming since the rainforest absorbs vast amounts of atmospheric carbon. Recent research has shown the potential for massive tree plantings to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.

"It's very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away," said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, as the Guardian reported. "We can't see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem."

The alarming rate of deforestation and its acceleration confirms suspicions that new president Jair Bolsonaro has allowed illegal land invasion, logging and burning. Bolsonaro has called his own government's satellite data lies.The president's comments followed preliminary satellite data that showed more than 400 square miles of the rainforest had been cleared in the first half of July — an increase of 68 percent from the entire month of July last year, according to the BBC.

Bolsonaro, the far right politician who has said he is fulfilling a mission from God, dismissed concerns expressed by European Union members and called it hypocritical since so many European forests have been wiped out.

"You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours," Bolsonaro said, as the Guardianreported. "If all this devastation you accuse us of doing was done in the past the Amazon would have stopped existing, it would be a big desert."

The DETER-B satellite system that the Brazilian government started to use in 2015 to track deforestation has shown that the record setting July deforestation is on pace to clear enough forest to fit New York City twice by the end of the month.

The DETER satellite data is considered preliminary. Detailed figures are released at the end of the year when data from other satellites and observatories is also collected, according to Newsweek.

"Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies," said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups, as the Guardian reported.

After years of conservation, Brazil's environmental track record has nose-dived in the first seven months of Bolsonaro's administration. He has given environmental oversight to the agriculture minister, who is the leader of a farming lobby. His foreign minister called climate science a part of a global Marxist plot. The government has invited businesses to register land counter-claims in areas that are protected nature reserves, indigenous territories and areas dedicated to sustainable production by native forest people, according to the Guardian.

‘A requiem for American democracy’: 5-4 Supreme Court vote rules partisan gerrymandering is ‘beyond the reach of the federal courts’

Elizabeth Preza June 27, 2019

no lnx

Supreme Court on Thursday in a 5-4 ideological split rejected limits to partisan gerrymandering, quashing an effort by advocates of political reform to rein in manipulative electoral district boundaries.

Chief justice John Roberts authored the ruling, which decided claims of partisan gerrymandering “present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”The ruling states that federal courts lack the authority to curb gerrymandering, and overturned a lower court decision that ordered the redraw of North Carolina’s Republican-drawn districts in time for the 2020 election.

The Supreme Court didn’t just rule that these specific instances of partisan gerrymandering were OK. It said it will *never* draw that line — will never say that any specific gerrymander has gone too far. So, states will only get even more aggressive now.https://t.co/pZ7k21yfNb

— Sam Baker (@sam_baker) June 27, 2019

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kaganwrote that, “for the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”

Kagan’s conclusion. pic.twitter.com/jpjLjnBpyF

— Matt Ford (@fordm) June 27, 2019

Kagan’s conclusion in the partisan gerrymander cases is a requiem for American democracy. pic.twitter.com/yq6pCB2ALi

— Matthew Segal (@segalmr) June 27, 2019

For some, the ruling served as a reminder for why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) remains focused on confirming judges above most other legislative priorities.

This is why Mitch McConnell has long prioritized the courts over all issues except campaign finance. If you care most about winning the game, you need to control the body that shapes the rules of the game. https://t.co/hj1aN3yWy5

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) June 27, 2019

scary version // 2 santas?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/a-political-tragedy-in-3-parts/

no lnx

A political tragedy in 3 parts

“The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things…” —Alfred North Whitehead

Part One — The Climate Crisis

Imagine a world heading—remorselessly, inexorably—towards tragedy. A world in which a clear alternative to tragedy was available, cheap, and simple, but was being undercut, if not ignored. That’s our world. That’s today. And of all Trump’s offenses against reason, reality, decency and honesty, it is his insistence that we continue on this tragic path toward a climate crisis that is his worst transgression.

And the chances are, the climate crisis and the tragedy it will create is likely far worse than you’ve been led to believe, for two reasons.

First, most of the climate-related estimates you hear in the news and from the IPCC have built in assumptions that we humans will take necessary actions to mitigate the worst of the climate crisis.

There’s no evidence that making such assumptions is a prudent thing to do. We’ve known about this unfolding tragedy for three decades now, yet we’ve been steadily increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses we release. In fact, in 2018 we set a record for the most CO2 ever emitted, and for the single largest increase in emissions year-to-year. Meanwhile, in May of this year, atmospheric CO2 levels reached 415 parts per million, a level higher than it’s been for more than 3 million years – literally before the dawn of human existence.

The second reason the climate crisis is likely far more dire than most people have been led to believe is that the IPCC, most of the scientific community, and the media present mid-range scenarios for temperature increases, not worst-case forecasts, and usually they don’t include potentially dangerous feedbacks.

In other words, despite knowing that we were heading toward a planetary crisis for more than three decades we’ve stayed relentlessly, remorselessly on track to meet or exceed the worst-case IPCC estimates. The world we’re fashioning with our fossil fuel experiment is, to us, essentially an alien planet, unlike the one humanity evolved, developed and prospered in.

But here’s the real tragedy: The solutions to this problem are in hand, but we’re not adopting the policies needed to get them used, even though it would save us money and create high paying jobs.

Within the last decade, the cost of renewable energy has dropped rapidly and battery prices have plummeted, even as battery performance skyrocketed. And between 2010 and 2018, according to Bloomberg NEF, the volume weighted price of lithium ion battery packs has fallen by a remarkable 85 percent, reaching just $176/kWh. Bloomberg forecasts call for prices to continue to drop, falling from $176 per kilowatt hour to $87 per kWh in 2025, and just $62 per kWh in 2030.

A simple set of policies like putting a price on carbon, stopping new leases for fossil fuel development on federal lands, and creating a program for low-cost loans to support a switch to clean energy could make the difference. Even without these policies renewable energy is cheaper than energy generated from fossil fuels, electric cars will soon cost less than conventional cars (in fact, in Europe, they already are), and we know how to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon we generate from agriculture. But instead of acting on it, we’re continuing blindly on a path towards mass extinctions and civilization wrecking climate change.

Part 2 — Corporate Tyranny, Wealth and Income Inequality

Imagine a world in which a very few exploited the many, absconding with the vast majority of wealth and creating an economy marked by an unsustainable mix of inequality and injustice. This too, is our world.

For example, here in the U.S., analysis of a recent study revealed that since 1989—when the data used in the study was first reported—the top 1 percent increased their wealth by $21 trillion, while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion. This trend began in earnest in 1980, when Republicans instituted their trickle-down, corporate-friendly two step, and neoliberal Democrats went along.

But obscene theft of wealth and income isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon, it’s global. And it too tracks the embrace of neoliberal economics and politics which seeks to shrink government’s influence, eviscerate regulatory programs, and tilt the playing field to favor capital instead of labor.

Again, the numbers reveal just how badly this neoliberal con has played out. At the end of 2017, the world’s richest 26 people owned as much as the bottom half of the world’s population.

This inequality is a direct result of government policies, and the solutions are relatively well-known. The dirty little secret that free-marketeers don’t want you to know is that embracing neoliberalism inevitably leads to monopolies and monopsonies, ultimately giving corporations and the ultra-rich sufficient market and political power not only to steal the 99 percent blind, but also to completely subvert democracy.

The fact is, inequality of this magnitude typically presages people storming the palace gates with pitch forks and torches, and it is completely unsustainable. It is also simple (although not necessarily easy) to reverse using known policies once advocated by the New Deal and now being espoused by the likes of Warren and Sanders, but once again, the Democratic Party, the media and the rest of the neoliberal establishment are gathered against them in a confederacy of dunces.

And therein lies the tragedy.

Part 3 — The Death of the Enlightenment

Imagine a world where superstition supplanted reason; where myth trumped reality. Increasingly, that’s our world too. In many ways this is the root cause of the other tragedies we are creating. We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world. We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.

Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment.

Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages.

Literally.

Two main things distinguished the post Enlightenment world from the pre-Enlightenment Dark Ages.

First, Francis Bacon’s Novo Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science) introduced a new way of understanding the world, in which empiricism, facts and—well, reality—defined what was real. It essentially outlined the scientific method: observation and data collection, formulation of hypotheses, experiments designed to test hypotheses and elevation of these hypotheses to theories when data and experiments consistently supported them. It was and is a system based on skepticism, and a relentless and methodical search for truth.

Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality. Decrees from on high—often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats—are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians. And of course, nothing can match the non-sense—and I use the term literally—of Trump’s insane prognostications.

We have climate change deniers in the face of a changing climate. We have people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel who create massive deficits from tax cuts for the rich, even though we’ve tried trickle down and supply side at least three times now, and it has failed every time. Facts don’t matter. Belief in astrology is on the rise. And more than forty percent of Americans believe Jesus will return to Earth before 2050, presumably ushering in the “end times.”

And we have a press that thinks a “balance” between the forces of darkness and reason is reasonable. Meanwhile, trust in scientists is eroding.

At a time when we have to navigate using empiricism, data, observation and skepticism in order to preserve some part of the progress we’ve made, and some of the natural life support systems we rely on, we are increasingly reverting to teleological reasoning in the pursuit of nonsense.

And this may be the greatest tragedy of all—those who advocate the kind of progressive policies that would halt climate change, restore an equitable distribution of wealth, and take on the increasingly irrational drift of our culture are rejected by their party, under-covered by the media, and discounted by the pundits.

Unless we the people rise up these tragedies will continue to play out, remorselessly, inexorably, and inevitably.

2 big SYS fails uncorrected led to djt: gt recess and gulf war 2, brexit

...curry salon

After the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a commission to investigate how exactly his country stumbled into such a tragic fiasco.The Chilcot Report (for Lord John Chilcot, who led the commission) was an account of political bungling and deception as thorough and damning as the Pentagon Papers. Its 2016 release made former Prime Minister Tony Blair, chief accomplice to George W. Bush in that disastrous undertaking, into a social leper. Unlike Robert Mueller, Chilcot had an absolute right to interview any witness and compel production of any document he felt he needed; nearly all his interviews were done in public, and he delivered his report direct to the people of the United Kingdom.

The war was hatched in America by ideologues bent on exporting democracy via bribery and force of arms. In the eyes of many, it surpasses Vietnam as the worst foreign policy blunder in our nation’s history. In a speech to the nation summarizing the case for it, Bush leaned heavily on the only possible rationale for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

For months, his vice president and national security adviser peddled “evidence” of nuclear and chemical weapons. Before his speech, Bush was told by experts at the Department of Energy that the evidence was false, but he kept the news to himself. To this day it remains unproven who was lying, and who was only lied to.

The Congressional Budget Office says the war cost the U.S. $2 trillion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz puts it at $3 trillion. Nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel died there, and tens of thousands more suffered disabling physical and psychic wounds. Iraqi casualties remain in dispute — as Gen. Tommy Franks informed reporters, “We don’t do body counts” — but estimates range from 180,000 to more than a million deaths. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees counted 3.7 million refugees. Americans think the war’s over. Last month, it took 166 Iraqi lives.

In 2009, as Gordon Brown was launching the Chilcot Inquiry, Barack Obama was being pressured to take a similar look back at how America was lured or lied into war. Obama took a different tack. Rather than appoint a commission with plenipotentiary powers, he did nothing. Aides said he thought retracing Bush’s path to war would make it hard to forge bipartisan alliances with Republicans.

Similar concerns colored his take on the other huge crisis he inherited, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that leveled the global economy. No one knows its true cost, only that the number exceeds most human minds’ ability to conceptualize. A Government Accountability Office study put the U.S. cost at $22 trillion.

Social and political costs were even higher. Post-meltdown austerity measures, following ondecades of stagnant wages just as millions of Middle East refugees flooded Europe, rocking center-left coalitions that had ruled the West since World War II. Far-right political parties the old order was too polite to label fascist began to metastasize. Britain got Brexit. America got Trump.[NOTE CONFLUENCE OF 2 FAILS]

When the crisis broke, Obama was running for president. His closing stump speech was a litany of vows to curb corruption; above all, to punish Wall Street fraud. His administration never brought a case. Three years later, he went on “60 Minutes” to explain that the worst behavior wasn’t actually illegal. Given his dazzling intellect and access to wise counsel, one assumes he knew that what he said wasn’t true.

Privately, Obama revealed his thinking. He worried that prosecutions would hurt banks. He worried he’d lose personal support in the business community. (A major culprit, Goldman Sachs, was also his biggest donor.) And he worried he’d lose business backing vital to building bipartisan coalitions in Congress.

Lying was as much a cause of the Great Recession as it was of the Iraq war. Loan originators lied about applicants’ creditworthiness. Investment bankers lied about the toxicity of mortgage portfolios. Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s and Fitch all lied. So did Obama and most of Congress, which meant major reforms, excepting only Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were designed to curb “irrational exuberance,” not the immorality at the root of what befell us.

Instead of going to prison, bankers got bailed out, while homeowners got betrayed. Like the meltdown itself, the government’s response helped incite a populist revolt. Obama and Clinton Democrats were deaf to it, but Trump’s final 2016 TV ad began “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment.” In the last week, it replaced nearly every other ad he had up in the industrial Midwest.

These failures — to investigate the origins of the Iraq war and the Great Recession and punish the culprits — were not anomalies. After 9/11, no one had the stomach to hold George W. Bush to account for ignoring intelligence reports on his desk, so the bipartisanship crowd invented a structural failure and wasted years rearranging intelligence and homeland security bureaucracies, resulted in a new Cabinet-level post, the Director of National Intelligence, who lacks the authority to direct anyone to do anything.

It happened after the 2000 election: Media barons set out to fix the exit polls, Congress set out to rid the world of hanging chads via nifty paperless ballots and the Democratic Party set out to rid the world of Ralph Nader.Thus, a pioneering GOP foray into voter suppression went nearly unremarked. Despite butterfly ballots, staged riots, a chief election official doing double duty as a Bush campaign chair and a Supreme Court concocting phony equal protection claims to rob Al Gore of real due process, Bush was clothed in legitimacy, leaving millions of Americans to conclude that the system was indeed rigged.

I doubt we’d be saddled with Trump had we not come to resemble him: way too materialistic, more than a bit narcissistic, unfocused, unlettered, infantile, even amoral. Our responses to these crises suggest that we also share a high tolerance for lying, a limited capacity for self-examination and an unspoken belief that the rich and powerful are above the law. Which brings us to the latest in our recent line of failures to look either evil or ourselves in the eye, the Mueller Report....

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/10/rod-schoonover-trump-attempted-suppress-state-dept-analyst-testimony-climate-crisis

The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.

As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover's testimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.

The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.

[pix]

National Security Council advisers wrote a number of comments on Schoonover's draft, saying the testimony was “not objective.”

The testimony “includes lots of climate alarm propaganda that is not science at all,” wrote William Happer,a senior member of the National Security Council who has sought to create a federal task force to challenge the consensus reached by 97 percentof peer-reviewed climate scientists who say humans are contributing to the climate crisis.

“I am embarrassed to have this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government,” Happer added, noting a particular objection to Schoonover's use of the term “tipping point” in reference to possible devastating, irreversible effects of the climate crisis.

“'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.

Related: Get the background from DeSmog on climate science denier William Happer, and read: Physicist William Happer, the 'Unmoored' Climate Science Denier Heading a White House Climate Probe

Schoonover was ultimately permitted to testify before the committee, but his testimony was not submitted into the record because, the Office of Legislative Affairs said, it did not “jibe” with the Trump administration's views on the climate.

President Donald Trump and many of his appointeesdenythat human activity like the extraction of fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of the globe, which scientists warn is already causing extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. As Schoonover mentioned in his testimony, the last five years have been the warmest on record according to NASA.

Although Schoonover was able to testify, climate action advocates decried the White House's attempt to stifle the information he eventually shared with the committee.

“Any attempt to suppress information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave the American public vulnerable and unsafe,” Francesco Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, told the Post.

...

yikes whales ca starve 519

As a result, global upwelling drastically decreases, causing a decrease in productivity as the waters are no longer receiving nutrient-rich water. Without these nutrients, the rest of the trophic pyramid cannot be sustained, and the rich upwelling ecosystem will collapse.^[16]

https://grist.org/article/the-arctics-ticking-carbon-bomb-could-blow-up-the-paris-agreement/

yoder 3/19

Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that theArctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.

If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.

“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, withconsequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.

This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.

Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom areindigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.

The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.

These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.

And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.

As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

yikes, scary amplify canada arboreal forest 2x rise? glacier 16x, ocean warming 4/19 and carbon bomb!

reverse matthew: poor get pooerer/ EJ 1st and worst, tho did not cause

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22042019/climate-change-inequality-gdp-equator-africa-russia-norway-canada

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24042019/climate-change-fish-local-extinction-marine-species-hit-harder-land-animals-study-nature

Sea creatures, especially those that live in shallower water near the coasts, are much more vulnerable to global warming than land animals, new research shows. The scientists found that local populations of marine animals are disappearing at double the rate of land-based species.

That's because marine animals like fish, crabs and lobster are already more likely to be living near the threshold of life-threatening temperatures, and because in the ocean, there are fewer places to hide from extreme heat, said Malin Pinsky, lead author of a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

non-linear

ipcc by time report out, daTA is 10 years old; all IPCC numbers are lowballed, sea level multiple interconnected factors; political layer overlays science

non-linear bit 30 min in

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-22-2019/

fell into crevasse (hidden snow bridge) start of bk/journey

LONG TERM SYSTEMIC DAMAGE

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/heres-why-mitch-mcconnells-mark-on-the-federal-judiciary-could-last-for-generations/

In either January 2021 or January 2025—depending on whether he serves one or two terms—Donald Trump’s presidency will become a memory. But his mark on the federal judiciary could last for generations. The Republican who is doing the most to help Trump achieve that is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and in an April 10 report for the Daily Beast, journalist Eleanor Clift explains why the Kentucky senator has been so helpful to Trump when it comes to moving the federal judiciary to the far right.

Clift opens her piece by observing, “What Mitch McConnell lacks in charisma, he more than makes up for with steely discipline”—and McConnell, to be sure, has been amazingly disciplined since becoming Senate majority leader in January 2015.

Clift outlines how much McConnell has done to advance the Republican agenda, writing, “McConnell’s goal is not fairness. He envisions a federal bench firmly on the right to steer the country for generations to come.His record so far: two Supreme Court judges, 37 Court of Appeals judges, and 57 District Court judges, including two confirmed Tuesday.”

The journalist elaborates, “He took extraordinary means to deny President Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland. And in the last two years, he’s taken numerous actions to override the Senate’s role of advise and consent.”

Clift notes that just last week, McConnell “pushed through a change in Senate rules…. to reduce the time for debate on certain judicial nominees and executive branch appointees from 30 hours to just two hours.” And she points to Patrick Wyrick, a 38-year-old District Court nominee from Oklahoma, as a beneficiary: under the new rules, Wyrick was confirmed by the Senate in a 53-47 vote on Tuesday, April 9. The far-right Wyrick is an ally of Scott Pruitt, Trump’s former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wyrick, Clift points out, “has only been on the Oklahoma Supreme Court for two years—and now, he’s on his way to a lifetime federal appointment. No wonder McConnell didn’t want anybody talking about Wyrick for 30 hours.”

Clift goes on to explain, “Republicans are now putting nominees forward in groups of four, which restricts senators in their ability to probe any one nominee. Wyrick was part of such a panel, which meant that each senator had just five minutes for questioning.”

McConnell (who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984) is up for reelection in 2020. And given how much of a red state Kentucky is, his chances of winning another term and staying on as Senate majority leader are quite good.

Clift concludes her report by stressing that McConnell has made it more difficult for Democrats in the Senate to vet GOP judicial nominees.

“Progressives need government to work to enact their agenda—Republicans not so much,” Clift observes. “They’ve kept their eye on the prize: the federal judiciary. And with McConnell in place, it’s paid off.”

not sure if tip pt, but not good, // cda 2x up?

https://www.ecowatch.com/arctic-climate-change-2634032427.html

Jon Queally

A new research paper by American and European climate scientists focused on Arctic warming published Monday reveals that the "smoking gun" when it comes to changes in the world's northern polar region is rapidly warming air temperatures that are having — and will continue to have — massive and negative impacts across the globe.

The paper new paper — titled Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971–2017 — is the work of scientists at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in Copenhagen (GUES).

"The Arctic system is trending away from its 20th century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic," said Jason Box of the GUES, lead author of the study. "Because the Arctic atmosphere is warming faster than the rest of the world, weather patterns across Europe, North America and Asia are becoming more persistent, leading to extreme weather conditions. Another example is the disruption of the ocean circulation that can further destabilize climate: for example, cooling across northwestern Europe and strengthening of storms."

John Walsh, chief scientist at AUF's research center, was the one who called arctic air tempertures the "smoking gun" discovered during the research — a finding the team did not necessarily anticipate.

"I didn't expect the tie-in with temperature to be as strong as it was," Walsh said. "All the variables are connected with temperature. All components of the Arctic system are involved in this change."

The study, published Monday as the flagship piece in a special issue on Arctic climate change indicators published by the journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first of its kind to combine observations of physical climate indicators — such as snow cover, rainfall and seasonal measurements of sea ice extent — with biological impacts, such as a mismatch in the timing of flowers blooming and pollinators working. According to Walsh, "Never have so many Arctic indicators been brought together in a single paper."

This three-and-a-half minute video put together by the research team, explains its methodology and findings in detail: [vid]

The new study comes as temperature records in the polar regions continue to break record after record. Last week, climatologists said Alaska experienced the highest March temperatures ever recorded.

Statewide temperatures averaged 27°F degrees last month, a full 4 degrees higher than the record set in 1965. Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist with the International Arctic Research Center at University of Alaska Fairbanks, told the Anchorage Daily News, "We're not just eking past records. This is obliterating records."

Also last month, as Common Dreams reported, the UN Environment Programme (ENUP) warned in a far-reaching report that winter temperatures in the Arctic are already "locked in" in such a way that significant sea level increases are now inevitable this century.

Rising temperatures, along with ocean acidification, pollution, and thawing permafrost threaten the Arctic and the more than four million people who inhabit it, including 10 percent who are Indigenous. But, as UNEP acting Executive Director Joyce Msuya noted at the time, "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic."

That warning was echoed by the researchers behind the new study out Monday. Their hope, they said, is that the findings about air temperatures and the delicate interconnections between the climate and other natural systems in the Arctic will "provide a foundation for a more integrated understanding of the Arctic and its role in the dynamics of the Earth's biogeophysical systems."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

100k arrests one month, try to prevent from being able to reqasylum (illegal b/c int'l treaty congress ratify thus --> US law?)

trump cuts funds to central am to improve conditions, thus death spiral [[tho complex b/c some skimmed of by cops/corrupt) ucsc honduras new bk?]

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032019/forest-wildfire-climate-change-tipping-point-study-douglas-fir-ponderosa-pines-west

Climate change in the American West may be crossing an ominous threshold, making parts of the region inhospitable for some native pine and fir forests to regrow after wildfires, new research suggests.

As temperatures rise, the hotter, drier air and drier soil conditions are increasingly unsuitable for young Douglas firs and ponderosa pines to take root and thrive in some of the region's low-elevation forests, scientists write in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wildfiresin these areas could lead to abrupt ecosystem changes, from forest to non-forest, that would otherwise take decades to centuries, the study says.

"Once a certain threshold was crossed, then the probability of tree establishment decreased rapidly," said Kimberley Davis, a researcher at the University of Montana and lead author of the study. "The climate conditions are just a lot less suitable for regeneration."

The two iconic species are important to both the region's forest ecology and its economy, particularly its timber industry.

Davis and her colleagues looked at growth rings of nearly 3,000 young trees in 33 fire-damaged areas of California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern United States to see when the forests recovered after fires over the past 30 years. Analyzing climate data over the same period, they found certain thresholds involving summer humidity for ponderosa pine, surface temperature for Douglas fir, and soil moisture for both species, beyond which there was a sharp decline in forest regrowth.

The warmer, drier air isn't harming mature trees, but it is preventing future generations from growing, Davis said.

"There could be a lot of areas where there is currently forest but if we have a fire we might not see regeneration," she said.

Thresholds 'Show How Much Is at Stake'

Davis and her colleagues found that most of the sites they looked at had crossed the temperature and humidity threshold at some point in the last 20 years.

They targeted the driest and warmest sites in the region to see if climate change was already beginning to affect forests. The researchers now plan to assess the extent to which regeneration is affected in relatively cooler, wetter sites in the region.

Several factors influence a forest's regrowth after a wildfire, such as the severity of the fire, regional drought and how the trees produce seeds. The researchers noted that as the region sees fewer years with climate conditions suitable for seedlings to grow, the nature of the trees' seed production, with heavy crops of cones only every few years, will further limit new growth.

Last year, wildfires burned more than 8.7 million acres nationwide, 32 percent higher than the 10-year average according to an annual report by the National Interagency Coordination Center released last week. More than 1.8 million of those acres were in California, the highest in recorded state history, according to state fire officials.

[graf]

The inability of forests to bounce back from such fires is cause for concern, said Joe Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy's North America region.

"The thresholds identified here show how much is at stake—losing forests because trees can't grow back—if we don't accelerate the switch to clean energy and invest more in natural climate solutions," Fargione said. "This study will help land managers identify forests at the greatest risk of not regenerating post-fire."

Fargione said such high-risk forests can be targeted for selective thinning to reduce the risk of forest fires and for restoration efforts to improve the success of forest regeneration.

Trees Play a Critical Climate Role

Protecting forests is important for slowing climate change because of their ability to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots.

A study Fargione and others published last fall found better forest, farm and land management practices offer natural climate solutions that could mitigate 21 percent of the United States' annual greenhouse gas emissions.

"It really highlights the fact that we need to begin a national and international conversation about how we can enhance the resiliency of our global forests," Anthony Swift, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Canada Project, said of the current study.

Swift said intensive logging, road building and cutting trees to make room for transmission lines weakens the ability of forests to deal with added stressors like climate change.

"We don't need to stop all activity in global forests, but it does raise the need to reconsider how and where we extract timber and engage in other industrial activities in forests," he said.

A report last month by NRDC looked at how clear cutting boreal forests in Canada by some U.S. toilet paper manufacturersimperils forests and could hasten climate change.The report called for alternatives, like using recycled paper, that don't lead to the fragmentation and clear cutting of intact forests. Leaving forests more intact could also help protect Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests in the American West, Swift said.

"Whether we are looking at wildfires or industrial activities, concerns that in a changing climate regeneration is going to be more difficult to achieve is an issue that we all need to be looking at more carefully because of the roll our forests have to play for the global climate," he said.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLIMATE SCIENCE

FORESTS

CLIMATE CHANGE

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ct loss

1/19

https://www.ecowatch.com/colorado-youth-fracking-case-2626070704.html

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erode irs ups inequality which destabilizes:

death spiral IRS cuts: but also polar Matthew Effect

[OMG]

The story has been different for poor taxpayers. The IRS oversees one of the government’s largest anti-poverty programs, the earned income tax credit, which provides cash to the working poor. Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients — whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 — are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently.

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https://www.alternet.org/while-rest-world-burned-billionaires-made-more-money-2017-any-other-year-history

During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis—from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods—one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world's billionaires.

*"No money for health or infrastructure, all the money in the world for yachts."

—Josh Shepperd*

According to the Swiss bank UBS's fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year—an astonishing 20 percent—bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than theGilded Age," the UBS report notes. "That period bred generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for more than 100 years."

UBS estimates that the world now has a total of 2,158 billionaires, with 179 billionaires created last year. The United States alone is home to 585 billionaires—the most in the world—up from 563 in 2017.

Meanwhile, according to a June report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty and "5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."

A significant percentage of the "newly created" billionaires are hardly the self-made men—and they are overwhelmingly men—of popular lore. According to UBS, 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth—a trend that has driven an explosion of wealth inequality over the past several decades.

According to UBS, this trend will continue to accelerate over the next 20 years, given that there are currently 701 billionaires over the age of 70.

"A major wealth transition has begun. Over the past five years (2012–2017), the sum passed by deceased billionaires to beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17 percent each year," the UBS report concludes. "Over the next two decades we expect a wealth transition of $3.4 trillion worldwide—almost 40 percent of current total billionaire wealth."

===

After Budget Cuts, the IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats is Facing “Collapse”

by Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel

Audits and criminal referrals are down sharply since Congress cut the tax agency’s budget and management changed priorities.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/why-the-irs-recent-dark-money-decision-may-be-less-dire-than-it-seems

Starting next year, the Internal Revenue Service will no longer collect the names of major donors to thousands of nonprofit organizations, from the National Rifle Association to the American Civil Liberties Union to the AARP. Democratic members of Congress and critics of money in politics blasted the move, announced last week by the Treasury Department, the IRS’ parent agency. The Democrats claim the new policy will expand the flow of so-called dark money — contributions from undisclosed donors used to fund election activities — in American politics. For their part, Republicans and conservative groups praised the decision as a much-needed step to avoid chilling the First Amendment rights of private citizens.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United unleashed these groups, typically organized as 501(c)(4)nonprofits, to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads. Their role in American politics has grown increasingly central. In theory, the new IRS policy could have a significant impact on the tax agency’s ability to detect improper contributions — and thereby curb illegal campaign spending.

But in practice, even critics acknowledge that the IRS very rarely audits nonprofits. In other words, the IRS will no longer receive information that it was seemingly making little use of. And the information in question was already shielded from the public’s view....

henry g

...Tom Engelhardt has persuasively argued that Trump’s election may in time be viewed as a wholesale “regime change,” one that will alter the political and economic trajectory of the country, or what might otherwise be described as a paradigm shift toward an anti-democratic or authoritarian mode of governance. This is a change that points to a democracy spiraling out of control and a prescription for the unfolding of what Hannah Arendt once called the “dark times” associated with totalitarianism. Engelhardt writes: ....

To date, Trump’s ascendancy has been compared to the discrete emergence of deeply reactionary nationalisms in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere. I would like to broaden the lens with which we view the events happening in the United States in a way that allows for a deeper historical understanding of the international scope and interplay of critical forces that characterize 21st-century globalization.

We are seeing both coherent and incoherent responses, of which ultra-nationalism is one, to the shifts and contradictions arising from the global domination of neoliberal capitalism, which is now the single greatest factor affecting a world increasingly brought to the brink of catastrophe by technological disruption,massive inequities in wealth and power, ecological disaster, mass migrations, relentless permanent warfare and the threat of a nuclear crisis. In the United States, shades of a growing authoritarianism buttressed by neoliberal values are present in Trump’s eroding of civil liberties, the undermining of the separation of church and state, health care policies that reveal an egregious indifference to life and death, and his attempts to shape the political realm through a process of fear, if not, as Snyder insists, tyranny itself.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/exploration-august-28-2018/

2 pm whole hr

Environmentalist Lester Brown on the fate the earth.

Hosted by Dr. Michio Kaku.

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of ...

https://www.amazon.com/Outgrowing-Earth-Security-Challenge.../dp/0393327256

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Lester:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: R. :{Brown:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is the founder of the :{Earth:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Policy and Worldwatch Institutes. He has ... the United Nations :{Environment:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Prize, and twenty-five honorary degrees.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and ... - Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/World-Edge-Environmental-Economic.../dp/0393339491

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal :{environmental:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: issues and ... These are some of the issues :{Lester:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: R. :{Brown:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: skillfully distills in World on the Edge. ... :{Lester:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: R. :{Brown:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is the founder of the :{Earth:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Policy and Worldwatch Institutes. ... You don't have to be a scientist to understand Mr. :{Brown's books:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, just ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: fate ?| ?Must include: ?fate

Lester R. Brown - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_R._Brown

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Lester:(style="font-weight:bold"):}::(style="text-decoration-line:none;cursor:pointer;display:block;padding:7px 18px;outline:0px;word-wrap:break-word"):}:Russel Brown (born March 28, 1934) is a United States environmental analyst, founder ...Brown is the author or co-author of over 50 books on global environmental issues and his works have .... In 2001, he left Worldwatch Institute to establish the Earth Policy Institute, devoted to providing a plan to save civilization.

media and sys fail:

Y:{ou have seen the stories. They're uplifting stories about people and communities dealing with adversity.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Some recent examples:

As Parker Molloy explains, these tales of perseverance are actually horror stories. The media's obsession with uplifting stories optimized for social media makes us miss how systems are failing Americans.

debt death spiral eg lose diriver's license

crude look: One critical aspect of interactions is feedback. Sometimes feedback stabilizes the system, as happens when we install a not-too-touchy thermostat to control the furnace. Other times feedback causes a system to go out of control, as happens when we place a microphone too close to a loudspeaker, producing an ever-increasing screech. The recent growth of market interconnectivity has resulted in a system rife with feedbacks. This has come about through new communication links, the rise of derivative securities, and the use of high-speed, computer-automated trading. Indeed, these changes have easily outpaced our ability to truly understand their implications, and financial markets have become an unintentional Promethean experiment upon which we now base our economic livelihood.

An example is the “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, when a simple oversight in the programming of a trading computer in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, caused a temporary collapse of global markets. The havoc that ensued resulted in dramatic price changes on key stock indices and caused the shares of previously valuable mainstay companies to be sold for pennies (not pennies on the dollar, mind you, but pennies). A five-second trading pause invoked fifteen minutes into the crisis was, fortunately (and remarkably), sufficient to begin to restore the system, and the markets settled back into a more familiar pattern.

In 2008 a much larger event happened that resulted in a financial tsunami that rolled across the world’s economy, affecting the lives of billions and plaguing us to this day. Examining this crisis, we find a situation where any single agent on the economic landscape, from homeowners to mortgage brokers to rating agencies, was making sane decisions, yet the connections among these agents created a series of unfortunate feedback loops that destined the system to fail.[wwi cascade? //]

The economic collapse of 2008 represents a major failure for the profession of economics. Not only did economists fail to see the onslaught coming, but once the crisis arose, they had no idea how to deal with it. Part of this failure can be traced to the reductionist desire to break things down to simple parts. In the language of modern economic theory, this led to a reliance on “representative agents,” constructs that attempt to capture the behavior of, say, all consumers using a single megaconsumer. In part, such a choice arises from the fourteenth-century friar Father William of Ockham’s dictate to prefer simpler explanations to more complicated ones. Of course, Ockham still requires that the model, complicated or not, explain what we want to understand. In reality, the use of representative agents is also driven by the limitations of the modeling tools typically used by economists, as these tools can be deployed only if there is a high degree of homogeneity in the system.

While homogeneity is a useful assumption—for both philosophical and practical reasons—the study of complex systems suggests that the behavior of heterogeneous systems may not be so easily averaged out. Whether we are looking at the temperature control of a honeybee hive or the likelihood of a riot, heterogeneous systems often function in ways that are different from homogeneous ones.

===

aha note nexus: cf max profit: kochs are being forced to go against their principles b/c of the dna max profit but also "structural" forces, eg it is cheaper and easier (eg to poison workers) overseas: race to the bottom

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/08/14/koch-subsidiary-invista-build-1-billion-new-plant-china

don w

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has previously reported on Koch Industries’ foray into China with its investment in SINA Corp, a leading Chinese tech company. Now comes the announcement by the fiber company INVISTA, a wholly owned Koch subsidiary since 2004, that it will spend $1 billion to build a facility in China to manufacture a chemical used in the production of nylon.

The new infusion of Koch cash into China comes in addition to more than $600 million INVISTA has invested in China over the past five years.

Koch Industries certainly has the money. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which slashed tax rates for corporations and the wealthy, is expected to provide the Kochs, as individuals and as partners in Koch Industries, with a windfall of as much as $1.4 billion per year.

Meanwhile, Koch subsidiaries in the United States have announced hundreds of layoffs this year.

...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/02/20/set-fail/impact-offender-funded-private-probation-poor

human rts watch

cindy Rodriguez, a 53-year old woman living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, had never been in trouble – “never had a parking ticket” – until 2014, when she was charged with shoplifting. Rodriguez survives on disability payments due to injuries to her neck and back, and lives in constant pain. When her case went to court, she was represented by a public defender, provided to individuals living in poverty who meet certain criteria. Rodriguez said her public defender advised her to plead guilty and accept probation, saying it was the best deal she would receive from the state.

Rodriguez was placed on probation for 11 months and 29 days under the supervision of Providence Community Corrections, Inc. (PCC), a private company that had contracted with the Rutherford County government to supervise misdemeanor probationers. Rodriguez’s lawyer told her probation was nothing to worry about, that she would just have to visit her probation officer once a week and pay her fees and fines. When she informed the judge about her stark financial situation and disability payments, he told her to do the best that she could. She owed the court US$578 for the fine and associated fees, and on top of that she would have to pay PCC a $35-45 monthly supervision fee. PCC also conducted random drug tests, though she was not charged with a drug-related offense, for which she would pay approximately $20 a test. The costs of probation ruined her life.

Every time Rodriguez went to PCC to visit her probation officer, she was pressured to make payments....

===

Scientists Warn We May Be on Track for 'Hothouse Earth' 8/18 see Global Warming. Don't say no one gave you a headsup. This is your official wakeup call.

Scientists Warn We May Be on Track for 'Hothouse Earth'

In two recent studies, scientists have looked into the future and into the past to see what might happen to the global climate if we fail to curb greenhouse gas emissions in time. The results are frightening.

A study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined how, once a certain threshold was crossed, feedback loops could push the planet's climate towards a "Hothouse Earth."

The researchers expressed uncertainty as to whether limiting warming to the Paris agreement's upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would be enough to halt the impacts of climate change, or if feedback loops already in motion would accelerate the process regardless.

"We note that the Earth has never in its history had a quasi-stable state that is around 2C warmer than the preindustrial and suggest that there is substantial risk that the system, itself, will 'want' to continue warming because of all of these other processes—even if we stop emissions," study author Katherine Richardson from the University of Copenhagen told The Guardian.xxx

Some of those other processes include the release of methane from the thawing of the permafrost and the dieback of carbon sinks like the Amazon Rainforest.

When it comes to sea level rise, the scientists outlined how the melting of Greenland's ice could disrupt the Gulf Stream current, lifting sea levels and warming the Southern Ocean,which would in turn melt more ice in Antarctica.

A "Hothouse Earth" would be four degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels, and the path towards reaching it would most likely flood deltas, increase the intensity of coastal storms, and kill off coral reefs by the end of this century or sooner.

Currently, the Earth is around one degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, and that is already leading to more extreme impacts than would have been predicted, study author and executive director of the Stockholm Resilience CentreJohan Rockströmtold The Guardian.

"The heatwave we now have in Europe is not something that was expected with just 1C of warming," Rockström said. "Several positive feedback loops are already in operation, but they are still weak. We need studies to show when they might cause a runaway effect."

The paper concluded that to safely avoid a hothouse scenario, humans would have to change their relationship to the Earth.

"Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state.Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values," the paper said.

Another paper published July 30 in Nature Geoscience looked millions of years into the past to see how hot an Earth with a carbon-dioxide-heavy atmosphere would really be.

The study used peat fossils to assess mid-level temperatures in the early Paleogene, 56 to 48 million years ago.

This was the period after the extinction of the dinosaurs that saw the rise of mammals, as well as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of 1,000 parts per million, which is what they are predicted to reach by the end of this century if no action is taken, The Atlantic reported.

The study found that during that time, average temperatures in what are now the UK, Germany and New Zealand averaged 23 to 39 degrees Celsius, 10 to 15 degrees warmer than now.

"Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we're currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate," study author and University of Bristol geochemist David Naafs told The Atlantic.

Naafs and his colleagues tried to assess temperatures in the tropics as well, but the ancient lignite samples from India they found turned up temperatures too hot for their method to accurately measure.

"Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius like in Africa and South America," Naafs told The Atlantic. "But we have no data so we don't know."

SODA TAXES TACKLE PUBLIC HEALTH CHALLENGES

Rising levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other serious public health challenges related to the consumption of sugary beverages have galvanized grassroots public health leaders. One tool they can use to address these challenges is a modest sales tax on sodas and sweetened beverages, with revenues going to support public health and education programs. New data show that consuming sugar in liquid form increases risks of serious health conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and obesity in a much more significant way than was previously known.

Soda taxes work. Researchers at Drexel University surveyed consumers before and after the implementation of Philadelphia’s tax and found that daily consumption of soda decreased by 40 percent and energy drinks by 64 percent while consumption of bottled water increased by 58 percent. Researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health found that sugary beverage consumption fell 21 percent in Berkeley after that city’s tax was implemented, while water consumption increased by 63 percent over comparison cities.

There’s a lot at stake for America’s biggest soda companies. Carbonated soft drinks–such as Coke, Fanta, Sprite, and Fresca–make up two-thirds of Coca-Cola’s production, and U.S. soda sales earned the company more than $10 billion in 2015. And PepsiCo’s soda sales – including Pepsi, 7Up, and Mountain Dew – still account for one-quarter of the company’s $38 billion in North American sales, despite a shift toward healthier products. But soda consumption fell to its lowest point in 31 years in the U.S. in 2016, according to Fortune, andCoca-Cola concedes that sweetened beverage taxes “are hurting Coke’s business.”

As cities and counties across the county introduce taxes on sodas and sweetened beverages to counter the public health risks, they are facing sophisticated opposition campaigns funded by these soda giants operating through their deep-pocketed trade group, the American Beverage Association (ABA). The ABA has launched big-dollar TV ad campaigns to fight soda taxes, spent heavily on lobbying state legislatures, sued to block soda taxes, and now is launching massive statewide ballot initiatives to roll back local soda taxes.

The soda industry uses the blandly named trade association to shelter its own brand names from controversy and condemnation, taps small business owners to champion their cause, and spins the tax as a “grocery tax” that will impact all consumers, not just those loading up the shopping cart with Coke and Snapple.

BIG SODA TURNS TO THE BALLOT TO BLOCK LOCAL HEALTH LAWS

Now the industry has latched on to statewide preemption ballot measures up and down the west coast as a way to halt local momentum on soda taxes. California and Washington’s preemption initiatives are seeking enough signatures to get on the ballot and must finish that process by July in order to go before voters in November 2018. Oregon’s initiative has already qualified for the November 2018 ballot.

Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, and Red Bull have thrown a combined $3 million at overriding voters’ will in Washington state (proposed initiative 1634), and the ABA has spent more than $7 million so far in the effort to override Californians’ local votes (Attorney General Tracking #17-0050).

California’s proposed initiative would stack the deck for the likes of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo by preventing cities and counties from raising any taxes without the approval of two-thirds of either voters or an elected body. That explains why the industry is throwing so much cash at the current California override attempt, making it potentially the most expensive political contest in the country in 2018.

The American Beverage Association California PAC is by far the largest contributor to the ballot committee (“Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses”) spearheading the industry’s preemption measure, accounting for nearly 85 percent ($7 million) of its total reported revenues ($8.3 million) as of June 22, 2018. The largest contributors to the ABA CA PAC in 2017 and 2018 are Coca-Cola ($3.4million), PepsiCo ($2.6 million), Dr. Pepper Snapple Group ($1.1 million), and Red Bull ($97,312), as of June 22, 2018.

Similarly, all but less than one percent of the $3 million contributed to Washington’s anti-soda tax “Yes! to Affordable Groceries” initiative committee as of June 18, 2018 was contributed by the soda industry: 47 percent from Coca-Cola, 36 percent from PepsiCo, 15 percent from Dr. Pepper Snapple, and 1 percent from Red Bull. But the committee’s website prominently features the logos of “supporters” such as Teamsters No. 28, the Washington Food Industry Association, and the Washington Farm Bureau.

InOregon, the similarly-named “Yes! Keep Our Groceries Tax Free!” initiative committee has raised over $5.2 million, apparently from retail grocery chains and their regional trade group the Northwest Grocery Association.

Industry efforts in these west-coast states are a “fantastic assault on local democracy, but also on the ability of cities and countries to function,” Pertschuk said. Pertschuk added that California’s initiative in particular “would be so devastating to communities, so far beyond soda taxes, it really would starve communities.”

First published by Salon. a pearson

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/07/17/book-review-fall-wisconsin-uplifting-read

A must-read on the summer book list is The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, by Dan Kaufman. This remarkable book takes readers on a winding journey through the Native American, Scandinavian, and Socialist roots of the Badger State to its latest incarnation as a Trump satellite state.

“Donald Trump’s victory may have shocked the Clinton campaign and media pundits, but the result merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s national unraveling,” writes Kaufman.

Wisconsinites have had a front row seat to this unraveling. But this is not a gloomy book, nor the dry, didactic reporting of the mainstream newspapers stripped of historical context and evocative language. It is a beautifully drawn portrait of resistance told via the voices of the state’s beleaguered citizenry.

PORTRAIT OF RESISTANCE

The book highlights Mike Wiggins, the chairman of the Bad River Band, and other tribal leaders who successfully battled theGogebic Taconite iron-ore strip minein the Penokee Hills after the company crafted its own bill and paid millions to buy off the state legislature. “The tribes, Wisconsin’s first conservationists, have now become the last hope, the only group with any power to stop the dismantling of the state’s environmental heritage,” writes Kaufman in one of the book’s most affecting chapters.

It stresses the national importance of the fight over Act 10, Walker’s union-busting legislation, which blindsided the voters–even Republicans.“Walker’s agenda, which was always there but nobody knew it, really came from somewhere else, like the Koch brothers, the national party, and ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council]. I don’t think it was a local agenda, frankly,” said former GOP State Senator Barbara Lorman.

It details the chutzpah of average citizens who step up to run for office when no one else will. From Lori Compass, who single-handedly launched a recall against Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald in 2011, to Randy Bryce, the ironworker who battled ALEC’s anti-union “right to work” bill and the gutting of prevailing wage. In 2018, Bryce decided to step up and take on one of America’s most prominent politicians, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Dozens of other Wisconsinites, including Tia Nelson, Jesse Barnes, Tim Cullen, Curt Meine, Todd Albaugh, Dave Poklinkoski, Marvin DeFoe, Dale Schultz, Tim Cullen, and more, are interviewed and paint a portrait of a resistance that didn’t waver though the deck was stacked against them. Included in this list is Rep. Fred Kessler, who found a way to challenge the GOP’s unprecedented partisan gerrymandering in federal court and get it ruled unconstitutional. Woven into the these tales are the stories of Chief Buffalo, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, socialist Emil Seidel, environmentalist Aldo Leopold, educator John Bascom, Congressman Victor Berger, Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, and other historical figures.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Kaufman writes that “ALEC played an essential role in the conservative network that has transformed Wisconsin,” highlighting three ALEC measures: school vouchers, right to work, and voter ID.[CRONON?]

This became crystal clear to a young mom living and working in Madison named Chris Taylor. Walker’s attack on unions and on the public schools where her kids went to school inspired Taylor to run for office in 2012 and, once elected, she continued to dig deeper into the group’s radical agenda, which has prompted over 100 American companies to stop funding it. Just last week, long-time supporter ExxonMobil stopped funding ALEC.

“ALEC defines the parameters of what’s possible,” Taylor explains in the book. Since being elected to the State Assembly, Taylor has taken it upon herself to attend ALEC meetings as often as possible in order to report on the organization for multiple outlets. Taylor describes in the book how isolated she feels in a sea of conservatives, including being chased through the halls of one meeting by a drunken legislator.

Taylor explains well the critical “infrastructure” that the GOP built in the state with the support of the $900 million Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which the Center for Media and Democracy exposed in an 11-part series in 2017, and how that infrastructure was critical to the election of Trump and the defeat of Clinton. This infrastructure included candidate training, ALEC politicians, state-based “think tanks,” legal teams, and phony media outlets.

Even in Democratic circles, the expanse and effectiveness of this infrastructure is not widely understood. “‘Republicans have a network, they have an infrastructure.’ We don’t. We might pick up a seat or two here and there, but until we have an infrastructure as strong as theirs, we’re going to lose,” says Taylor.

A NATIONAL MODEL

The book tells a tale of how Wisconsin “went from a state widely admired as a ‘laboratory of democracy’ to a testing ground for national conservatives” bent on making key states Republican strongholds. “Those efforts have been wildly successful, culminating in Wisconsin’s startling deliverance of the White House to Donald Trump,” writes Kaufman.

Grover Norquist explains the centrality of Walker’s Act 10legislation to the Trump election in the book: “Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 did not lay the groundwork for Republican political dominance. But the March 2011 signing of Act 10, a dramatic reform of public-sector labor laws, by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker certainly did. To understate it: If Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern day Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics. It’s that big a deal.”

Norquist’s anti-union coalitional efforts, hyper-funded by the Kochs and the Bradley Foundation, helped take the Wisconsin “model” national. The nation is now facing an Act 10 of its own, as Trump’s pick to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, served up the deciding vote for the June Janus vs. AFSCME Council 31 decision, which will introduce “right to work” conditions nationwide, as the Center for Media and Democracy detailed in an award-winning investigation in February.

HOPING FOR AN ENCORE

Kaufman followed his book with a *New York Times essay “Progressive Populism Can Save Us From Trump.” Many in Wisconsin, who gave Bernie Sanders 71 of 72 counties in 2016, hope he is right.*

There is only one flaw in Kaufman’s important book.Walker’s brain, R.J. Johnson, is only mentioned once. Johnson, a native of Florida, is not only Scott Walker’s chief political advisor, but he also oversaw and funneled some $20 million in dark money into the 2011-2012 recall races, and millions more into Senate, Assembly, and judicial races, prompting a criminal investigation by a Republican state prosecutor. Johnson has been responsible for the most disgusting political ads ever aired in the state, the utter destruction of the Wisconsin Supreme Court (turning one of the state’s most respected institutions into what *The New Yorker called a “disgraceful mess”), and the wholesale dismantling of Wisconsin’s clean election laws. Few political operatives have had such as impact on the state as this slavish servant of secret money in campaigns and elections.*

Let’s hope Kaufman is saving material for his next book.

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/fossil-fuel-lobbying-2588126755.html

Fossil Fuel Industry Outspent Environmentalists and Renewables by 10:1 on Climate Lobbying, New Study Finds

By Itai Vardi ...published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle shows that between 2000 and 2016, lobbyists spent more than $2 billion trying to influence climate legislation in the U.S. Congress.

Analyzing data from lobbying reports made available on the website OpenSecrets.org, Brulle found thatelectric utilities spent the largest sums during this timeframe followed by the oil, gas and coal industries, and transportation sector,respectively. Overall, lobbying by corporate sectors involved in the production or use of fossil fuels overshadowed that of environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.

Brulle acknowledges that the leading spenders do not take monolithic approaches and at times lobby in support of climate legislation.

"Different corporations typically push for whatever positions are advantageous to their economic well-being," writes Brulle. He says that further research is required to parse out the effect of such variable lobbying positions on climate legislation.

Though climate lobbying only accounted for 3.9 percent of the total amount spent on legislative lobbying between 2000 to 2016, its rates fluctuated considerably.Early on, relatively little money—only about $50 million, or 2 percent of all lobbying—was spent trying to sway federal legislators' opinions during the years leading up to and including 2006.

But in the years that followed, climate lobbying expenditures shot up, reaching a high point of $362 million in 2009, which accounted for 9 percent of all lobbying that year alone. The next year, 2010, saw only a slight drop, before climate lobbying efforts plunged, eventually reaching about 3 percent of total lobbying after 2011.

Of course, 2009 marked the year that the House of Representatives narrowly passed the landmark climate legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill. However, that effort died on the floor of the Senate just over a year later.

To explain these fluctuations, Brulle argues that climate lobbying grows as the potential to enact climate legislation increases. This is especially true when one party, that has campaigned on passing climate legislation, controls government—findings that have troubling implications for American democracy.

"What we have is a group of unelected lobbyists representing special interests negotiating with Congressional Representatives on climate legislation," Brulle told DeSmog via email. "The minimal representation of environmental groups means that arguments for climate action to protect the common interest will be marginal considerations. Instead, special interests dominate the conversation, all working for a particular advantage for their industry. The common good is not represented."

...

includes doomsday problem

https://www.amazon.com/Were-Doomed-Now-What-Climate/dp/1616959363

We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”

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audio interview

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https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-july-10-2018/

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~ plutocracy, global response needed

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create collective meaning is our superpower

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cascade effect Trump’s three anti-union executive orders, two of which target labor organization and one that makes it easier to fire federal civil servants.Part of that effort is to deny union members the opportunity—and their privilege—to visit with lawmakers on official time.

Should you be worried that these executive orders attacking federal unions—which are comprised of scientists and engineers—might negatively impact the environment and public health?

janus, gerry muslim ban scotus bad news

yikes, swing will go hard right always

Justice Anthony Kennedy plans to retire, Reuters reports.

The move gives Donald Trump the opportunity to replace a pivotal vote on the Supreme Court. Kennedy is viewed as a key swing vote and any replacement by the president will likely shift the bench to a more conservative ideology.

In a letter to the president, Kennedy “[expressed] profound gratitude for having had the privilege” of working on the Supreme Court and “defend the Constitution and the laws hat must always conform to its mandates and promises.”

...

https://www.alternet.org/anthony-kennedy-retire-supreme-court-giving-trump-chance-appoint-yet-another-conservative-justice

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/supreme-court-decides-let-political-extremists-run-wild-key-election-case

U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all-but dismissed one of the most-watched election law cases in recent years, saying those in Wisconsin filing a lawsuit that sought to show how extreme partisan gerrymandering was anti-democratic had no basis to sue.

It also took no action on a second partisan gerrymandering case from Maryland.

“The Court has not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III standing,” the majority said in the Wisconsin case, sending it back to a lower court. “A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legislature is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. The harm asserted by the plaintiffs in this case is best understood as arising from a burden on their own votes.”

The Wisconsin case sought to show how the state’s GOP-led legislature in 2011 segregated each party’s reliable voters by party to draw legislative districts after the 2010 Census to create a red super-majority. In the Maryland case, those suing said a Democratic-led legislature had overreached to erase a GOP-held House seat.

The Wisconsin suit was the most carefully watched of the two gerrymandering cases, because it involved statewide jockeying of political districts, as opposed to a single congressional seat. It was also the platform for advanced analysis that showed how the use of technology was able to tilt the electoral playing field to game political advantage based on voter turnout patterns.

The decision will reverberate on many political and cultural levels. Seen from a partisan standpoint, the Court is saying that the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that Wisconsin’s Republican mapmakers were able create a structural head start in the likely popular vote was fair game—even if it led to one-party rule for most of this decade. Beyond the technicalities of how the GOP nullified their opposition’s ability to win in typical election cycles (2018 is not a typical year), the Court’s majority is saying that rebalancing elections to create greater equality among voters is not a constitutional priority.

Going deeper, the Court’s action is likely to signal that ruling parties in supermajority state legislatures are free to tinker with the rules of voting and elections as they see fit—to preserve their power. (Wisconsin was one of more than a dozen red states that drew extreme gerrymandered maps after the 2010 census, leading to super majorities in their state legislatures and House delegations. Those ultra-red majorities then passed many of this decade’s voter suppression, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and anti-safety net laws.

On a cultural level, the Court is signaling that American democracy will remain a deeply uneven system, where governing classes can advantage themselves and take steps to undermine the participation and power of their opponents or under-represented constituencies.While there is a tendency among the judiciary to keep a certain distance from the political process—as a co-equal branch of government and separation of powers—the fact remains that the Court is not seeking to rebalance the most glaring anti-democratic features in the fundamentals that shape the electoral process.

Inequality in elections is going to remain a formidable obstacle. Only last week, in purple North Carolina, did the Republican-led legislature propose anew series of election rules that would disadvantage a key Democratic voting block—African Americans who voted on the weekend before the Tuesday general election. The state’s GOP proposed, among several measures, to eliminate the early voting option used by 200,000 citizens in 2016.

That move came despite a federal appeals court in 2016 rejecting an earlier slate of anti-participatory election reforms, saying those measures targeted the state’s black voters “with almost surgical precision.” But now, with the Supreme Court not acting on the partisan gerrymandering cases, the political process will be freer to revert to more aggressive tactics to advantage one side—where partisan power apparently carries more constitutional weight than equality among the electorate.

===

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/we_are_lurching_toward_plutocracy_rep

dodd frank rollback

===

game over tipping pt?! rbg v gorsuch

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/supreme_court_deals_blow_to_workers

a major blow to workers’ rights, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 Monday that employers can use arbitration clauses to prohibit workers from banding together to challenge violations of federal labor laws in class-action lawsuits. Arbitration is often confidential. Many workers may agree to mandatory arbitration clauses without even being aware of it when they sign a contract with their employer. In a rare show of public displeasure, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, calling the majority opinion “egregiously wrong” and saying, “The court today holds enforceable these arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts—including the provisions requiring employees to litigate wage and hours claims only one-by-one. Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees.” For more, we speak with Terri Gerstein, former labor bureau chief for the New York State Attorney General’s Office

amplify death spiral?

Shankar Vedantam

The researchers believe this is becausepoliticians in gerrymandered districts are less likely to advocate for goods on behalf of their constituents.

5/1

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/607303602/in-gerrymandered-districts-constituents-likely-to-lose-economic-security

interesting that frack was seen by me as part of triple whammy take out coal but now tip pt the other /bad way:

World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, Says Cornell Scientist

*In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methanefrom the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than ...

2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal.

In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team, Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing in changing the world's climate.

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That's if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today.

The Difference of a Half Degree

An average global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) will bring catastrophic changes — even as compared against a change of 1.5° C (2.7° F). “Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,” with just that half-degree difference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it's “extremely unlikely” that the world will keep to a 1.5° change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea's presentation concludes.

Earlier models, like an often-cited 2012 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, dramatically underestimated the rise in temperatures, when its projections are compared against more than a half-decade of additional temperature recordings, Ingraffea says. “Every one of these scenarios under-predicted actual global warming,” he points out as he describes the models presented in that landmark 2012 study.

“Whereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees Centigrade in 2040,” he adds, “we're almost there today.”

A Different Energy Future, if Not for Fracking?

So what happened?

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. natural gas production was flat or falling. If that trend had continued along the same track it was following from 2006-2008, then wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources might have had a chance to displace both natural gas and coal as major energy sources in America, according to Ingraffea.

Instead, the shale gas rush, propelled by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), swept across the U.S., with drillers snapping up land to drill for previously inaccessible fossil fuels locked in geologic formations of shale rock from coast to coast.

If the shale gas rush hadn't disrupted trends around that time, Ingraffea estimates that the wind energy sector alone could have produced roughly triple the amount of energy expected by the end of this coming decade, a difference of roughly 400 gigawatts.

“We can easily see there is a loss of potential — large amounts of wind energy — because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy,” Ingraffea explains in the lecture.

While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have been almost exclusively aimed at just 5 percent of the world's population, North Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining 95 percent of the world as well.

It's an alarming message — even though the shale rush has stumbled somewhat as gas prices collapsed and many drillers went bankrupt, the cumulative impact of American fracking appears to have set the entire world on a collision course with climate change's most extreme effects.

The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might have otherwise, and — far from serving as a bridge fuel — fracking huge amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in pushing the world toward a vastly more difficult future.

Ingraffea's lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project's Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewed below:

...*

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea

In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal.

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years,says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That's if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today.

The Difference of a Half Degree

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it's “extremely unlikely” that the world will keep to a 1.5° change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea's presentation concludes.

“Whereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees Centigrade in 2040,” he adds, “we're almost there today.”

A Different Energy Future, if Not for Fracking?

So what happened?

“We can easily see there is a loss of potential — large amounts of wind energy — because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy,” Ingraffea explains in the lecture.

Ingraffea's lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project's Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewed below:

...

graphs

===

yikes

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-packing-courts-unqualified-conservatives

Many of Trump’s appointees have drawn scrutiny, including Leonard Grasz, who was the Senate—who the Senate confirmed earlier this month to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals despite a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association. Grasz is one of at least four Trump nominees the ABA deemed “not qualified.” Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. District Court in Washington withdrew from consideration, after widely circulated video showed he was unable to answer basic questions about the law and had never tried a case in court. This is Louisiana Republican John Kennedy questioning Matthew Petersen at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing earlier this month.

===

how did we go from triple whammy win to fucked?

CFG, CU

LAMAR

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05122017/lamar-smith-congress-climate-change-fossil-fuel-industry-house-science-committee

no link pix grafic

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas—It's midway through fall, and cold has yet to settle over the Eckhardt family orchard. So, Diane Eckhardt waits with rising apprehension.

Cold is the switch that triggers the growing sequence that by summer has limbs sagging with ripe, juicy peaches. The reliable chill season in Texas Hill Country allowed Eckhardt's grandfather, Otto, to start the family business here in the 1930s.

But last year, with temperatures the warmest since 1939, Eckhardt's trees produced just 10 percent of their usual yield. And the year before, warm weather reduced production between 60 and 70 percent. Now, Eckhardt worries not only about the next crop, but about the future of a business she hopes will be passed on to her niece and nephews.

"We know climate change is happening," she said.

But while the Eckhardts face that certainty, their congressman sows uncertainty, casting doubt on the consensus science that greenhouse gases are the dominant cause of rising global temperatures, and opposing government action to curb them.

Sixteen-term Republican Lamar Smith has used his power as chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee for the past five years to do battle on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Embracing the arguments of a small group of climate contrarians, Smith acknowledges that warming is happening but says more research is needed to determine the amount and causes, and whether it does more good than harm.

Smith's critics say he misrepresents facts, cleverly casts doubt on legitimate studies by claiming they are based on "secret data" and uses his subpoena power to help industry battle state and federal regulators and environmental groups. The result is that a panel with vast jurisdiction over all government non-military science, research and development has become an instrument of attack on mainstream climate science.

"Anyone stating what the climate will be in 500 years or even at the end of the century is not credible," Smith said at a hearing he chaired in March. "In the field of climate science, there is legitimate concern that scientists are biased in favor of reaching predetermined conclusions. This invariably leads to alarmist findings that are wrongly reported as facts."

Things weren't always this way. Under both Democratic and moderate Republican leadership, the science committee since the late 1970s had educated lawmakers and the public about the threats posed by rising temperatures caused by human activity and the need for decisive action.

But in a case study of the power of fossil fuel interests to shape government policy, the industry's money and alliances with conservative think tanks and advocacy groups transformed the committee's membership and supported the rise of Smith, son of an old oil and ranching family in South Texas.

Choke Hold: House Science

Today, "we're in total denial," says the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel, fellow Texan Eddie Bernice Johnson. Instead of looking at the evidence and making policy recommendations on climate—as once happened—the committee is "pretending to be oblivious."

"When you look at the [campaign] contribution list, it becomes very clear" that the forces that oppose regulation are calling the shots, she said.

Smith, 70, has announced he will retire after his term as chairman ends next year. But many believe his legacy will be lasting.The committee under Smith has "contributed to the sort of diminishment of science in public policy," said Andrew Rosenberg, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization that has been one of Smith's targets. "It has reinforced the view that everything must be partisan, and you've got to choose sides. It sends a message that science is partisan, too."

The Science Committee Transformed

The House Science Committee held Congress' first hearings on climate science in 1976, and it resulted in passage of bipartisan legislation to establish a National Climate Program Office. Five years later, Al Gore, then a congressman and committee member, co-chaired another set of hearings on "Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Greenhouse Effect."

With fidelity to its nonpartisan tradition, the committee championed scientists who found themselves under fire during President George W. Bush's administration. The Republican chairman at the time, Sherwood Boehlert of New York, faced off against Bush officials and GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill, armed, he says now, with what he learned about global warming during 24 years on the committee. "I [witnessed] a parade of some of the most distinguished scientists...from around the world testify that climate change is for real, it has serious and negative consequences, and we damn well better do something about it," Boehlert said.

But by 2013, Republican moderates like Boehlert who accepted climate science were eliminated. Redistricting by both parties—to make red districts redder and blue districts bluer—was partly to blame. But much of the change was due to a systematic effort by conservatives, with significant help from fossil fuel interests that were seeking to stave off policies that might cut into their profits.

The Senate Science Committee's Disappearing Center

Helping the effort was the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the door to unlimited political spending. The decision empowered hugely wealthy donors like the oil billionaire Koch brothers seeking to shape politics in America. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry spent an unprecedented $90.5 million to elect friendly Republicans, an increase of 66 percent over the previous two election cycles (compared with $15.7 million they gave to Democrats), according to Center for Responsive Politics data.

Sherwood Boehlert

In the end, nearly a third of the Republicans who sat on the committee in 2006—seven of 24, including Boehlert—were defeated or retired over the next six years in the wake of primary challenges from the right.

The conservative advocacy group, the Club for Growth,financed many of the challenges. The group has a broad low-tax, less-government agenda, but its victims saw the hand of fossil fuel interests at work.

"My most enduring heresy was saying that climate change was real," said Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who became convinced of climate reality on a science committee trip to Antarctica. He lost in 2010 to Rep. Trey Gowdy, who was endorsed by the Club for Growth. "It had appeared that I had crossed to the other side and had become unfaithful to the tribe."

Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, a science committee Republican defeated in the 2008 primary, believed the conservative activists had a deeper objection than his stand on climate issues. "The foundation upon which their enterprise was built was to select members of Congress that could be told what to do," Gilchrest said. "They wanted a puppet."

The Club for Growth, which spent between $6 million and $22 million each election cycle between 2004 and 2016, did not have to disclose its donors until it established a Super PAC in 2010. But at least $3 million came into the club from the labyrinth Koch network between 2009 and 2015, according to the tax returns of their various nonprofit advocacy groups. And the club's Super PAC disclosures show that its wealthy donors include some heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry and connected to the Koch brothers, like hedge fund manager Paul Singer of Elliott Management, and Quantum Energy, a Houston private equity and venture capital firm specializing in oil and gas.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry became the biggest contributor to science committee members, according to Center for Responsive Politics data.

House Science Committee: Follow the Money

The oil and gas industry has been Smith's biggest contributor, with $764,000 in donations over the course of his career in Congress. Smith points out that the industry's share is just a small portion of his overall contributions—about 5 percent of the $14 million he has raised since the 1989 election cycle.

Lamar Smith's Campaign Contributions

"I'm supported by a wide variety of individuals and industries, including the energy sector, which employs 400,000 Texans statewide," Smith told InsideClimate News.

After the 2012 election, with GOP moderates on the science committee wiped out, the House Republican leadership chose Smith from among three climate deniers vying for the chairmanship. He had raised four times more money that election cycle than his competitors, F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Dana Rohrabacher of California, and had doled out more than $147,000 to help other Republican candidates.

'Secret Science' Charge Returns

Even before Smith took over the committee, he co-signed a letter in December 2012 calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release the "secret data" behind proposed air pollution regulations. On the letter with him was Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a conservative who had unseated Gilchrest and who then chaired the panel's energy subcommittee. "It is likely that the majority of benefits from all federal regulations are grounded in data sets that have never been available to the public," the letter said.

The "secret science" charge was false. At issue was a large, long-term federally funded study published by Harvard researchers in 1993 showing that fine soot pollution, largely from burning fossil fuels, shortened lives. The researchers had obtained personal health information from 22,000 participants on the promise of confidentiality. Fossil fuel interests and advocacy groups they funded rebranded this common health research privacy measure as sinister. In 1997, when the Clinton administration was finalizing the first-ever air quality standards on fine soot, protesters in white lab coats appeared on Capitol Hill holding signs that said, "Harvard, release the data!" The protesters were hired by a group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was founded by the Koch brothers and which also received funding from the Exxon Foundation that year.

The oil and gas industry has been Rep. Lamar Smith's biggest campaign contributor. The Texas Republican was first elected to Congress in 1986.

Since that time, hundreds of studies have affirmed that fine soot causes respiratory and cardiovascular disease and death. And a panel jointly funded by the EPA and the auto industry received access to the Harvard study's raw data for a reanalysis in 2001 that validated the original study.

But 16 years after the white lab coat protests, Smith was reviving the "secret science" charge just as the Obama administration was finalizing a plan to tighten the fine soot regulations, a move vehemently opposed by coal-fired power generators and oil refiners.

Eight months after assuming the chairmanship, Smith slapped the EPA with the first subpoena that the House science committee had issued in 21 years. The subpoena demanded the EPA release data from the Harvard study and a separate American Cancer Society study in sufficient detail "to allow one-to-one mapping of each pollutant and ecological variable to each subject." The EPA worked to obtain the data without personal information, and the agency ultimately released some to Smith, but he was not satisfied. "What is EPA Hiding From the Public?" was the title of a Smith op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in June 2014.

Smith drafted legislation called the Secret Science Reform Act to require that the EPA base its regulatory decisions only on scientific data that is publicly available and reproducible. Science advocacy groups say the restriction would curb all regulation to protect public health because health research routinely relies on confidential patient information. It also would rule out regulations based on studies of natural disasters or human-caused events—like spills of oil or fracking wastewater—since they could not be reproduced. And it might put at risk EPA's 2009 finding that carbon pollution was an endangerment to health—the underpinning of all Obama administration action on climate change. The bill is "based on a misunderstanding of how science works," said Rush Holt, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at a hearing earlier this year.

Smith's legislation, which passed the House twice in the Obama era but died in the Senate, was approved by the House again in March with a new name: the HONEST ACT (the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017).

"Our goal has been to rely on good science, the facts and reliable data in an effort to discover the truth," Smith told InsideClimate News, when asked to sum up the role he has tried to play. "It is my responsibility to ensure that federal agencies rely on science that has integrity and is free from political influence."

Political Operatives Replace Scientists

Smith's first subpoena came only after a contentious debate and party-line vote in the committee. But his powers were greatly expanded in 2015, when the House leadership allowed him unilateral subpoena power. Smith said it was necessary because, under Obama, "federal agencies often stonewalled the committee's constitutional obligations to conduct oversight." He would issue 25 subpoenas over the next two years, against scientists, regulators, environmental groups and even state attorneys general.

Smith also hired seven staffers from the aggressive House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which had provided fodder for Republican attacks on the Obama administration with its probes on Benghazi, IRS treatment of conservative groups, solar manufacturer Solyndra's bankruptcy and other issues. "In 2015, it became increasingly apparent that the Obama administration was advancing a one-sided, unconstitutional agenda," Smith told InsideClimate News. "We needed to bring in staff who had strong backgrounds in conducting oversight of government agencies and getting them to answer questions."

Feeling Climate Impacts in Texas' 21st District

The science committee majority staff, which had more than a dozen Ph.D. scientists during the Boehlert era, now was loaded with political operatives like Mark Marin, who had been deputy staff director for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Brazauskas, who had been a law clerk for the National Mining Association before serving as a counsel on Issa's House Oversight committee.

Warming 'Pause': Smith Investigates NOAA

In June 2015, Smith and his team targeted research published by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The paper in the peer-reviewed journal Science undercut a key talking point of climate science deniers: It found that there had been no pause in global warming over the past two decades.

In response to Smith's subpoenas and letters, NOAA provided the science committee with its raw data and methodology, and its scientists gave briefings on their research for committee staff. But Smith wanted the researchers' emails.

He said an agency whistleblower had alleged that the paper had been rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of agency employees. The purported whistleblower, a NOAA scientist named John Bates, later said his complaint had been mischaracterized; he disagreed with how the scientists stored and archived their climate data, but he did not dispute the study's findings or allege data manipulation. "I knew people would misuse this," he told Science magazine's website.

Eddie Bernice Johnson fired back at her committee's chairman in a letter: "The only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science—i.e., doing their jobs."

Smith's NOAA investigation provoked an unusual rebuke from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and six other major scientific groups, who accused him of chilling scientific inquiry.

Since the NOAA paper's publication, several studies as well as a reanalysis of the original NOAA work have affirmed the finding that there has been no hiatus in global warming.

But Smith continued to accuse the scientists of wrongdoing. In a March hearing, Smith reiterated that the committee heard from whistleblowers that NOAA employees "put their 'thumb on the scale' during the analysis of data." And in an April speech at an annual conference of climate deniers sponsored by the Heartland Institute, Smith said both NOAA and EPA during the Obama administration had been "complicit in furthering a one-sided partisan agenda focused on climate change."

MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel believes he gained insight into Smith and his approach after an exchange a couple of years ago. It began with a discussion on a topic on which they agreed—how the U.S. had fallen behind Europe in numerical weather prediction. Emanuel took the opportunity to give Smith a copy of a primer he had written for non-scientists on climate science and risk.

Lamar Smith on the Science

A few days later, Emanuel got a call from Smith, who wanted to talk about the book. "He struck me as a very astute man," Emanuel said. "Clearly he had read the book very thoroughly or had been thoroughly briefed on it.

"He proceeded politely to ask sharp questions. Could this be wrong? Could it be not as bad? A lot of the questions were about uncertainty," Emanuel recalled. At first the scientist felt he was making headway with the congressman, a hope that was quashed the next time he heard Smith publicly dismissing climate science. "In hindsight, I think I was unwittingly a coach, helping him armor himself against reasonable arguments."

"There's nothing stupid about Lamar Smith," said Emanuel. "He's not uniformly anti-science. It's not that he doesn't understand the science. He struck me as a lawyer for the defense, who knows his defendant is guilty, but is bound by law or honor or legal code to defend."

Subpoena Power Unleashed

Smith's tactics to defend fossil fuel energy created legal worries for the EPA, which was battling the industry in court. Officials feared that the constant document requests by Smith would help industry lawyers obtain otherwise confidential material that could be used against the agency in court.

In one instance, Smith acted with a like-minded Republican committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz of House Oversight, to demand internal documents on one of the Obama administration's most contentious regulations, intended to protect thousands of waterways and marshlands. After Chaffetz obtained memos showing an interagency dispute over the rule, he released them. EPA's foes, including the oil industry, which would not normally have had access to the records, sought to introduce them in a court challenge to the new clean water regulation. "Once documents have been disclosed and widely disseminated, an agency has waived any deliberative process or other privilege that may have applied," argued North Dakota's attorney general, the lead litigant.

In letters to Smith, EPA repeatedly raised its concern about the risk of releasing documents in cases involving the Clean Water Act, the regional haze pollution standards, a decision over a controversial copper mine decision in Alaska, and others.

Rep. Lamar Smith, speaking here with John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama, strongly opposed the Obama administration's efforts to reduce power plant emissions.

foto

Smith's most dramatic rush to the legal defense of the fossil fuel industry was his unprecedented move last year to issue subpoenas to two state attorneys general and several nongovernmental advocacy groups over the states' climate change fraud investigation of Exxon. He accused the attorneys general of colluding with environmentalists, violating Exxon's free speech rights and chilling private sector science funding.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, refused to comply with the subpoena, which he said "oversteps the boundaries of federalism, separation of powers, and the committee's own jurisdiction."

Smith disagreed. "The science committee has jurisdiction over all non-military, non-medical research and development," he said in the email to InsideClimate News. "We had an obligation to the scientific community and the American people to find out whether the attorneys general have intentionally intimidated researchers who disagree with them."

Legal experts see another possible outcome of Smith's inquiry. If he were to obtain and make public internal documents like correspondence among the attorneys general—material that Exxon would have trouble obtaining as a litigant—the company could use it in court.

"It sure looks like he is acting on behalf of Exxon," said Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat who is part of a coalition supporting the investigation by New York and Massachusetts. "It's hard to understand why he thinks that it's an appropriate role for a congressman and Congress to get involved on behalf of an entity like Exxon. It's not like ExxonMobil is incapable of defending itself."

And, indeed, even though Smith did not obtain documents, Exxon cited the mere fact of his inquiry to give weight to its effort last year to derail the probe. Exxon picked up Smith's argument that the attorneys general were appointing "themselves to decide what is valid and what is invalid regarding climate change." For that reason and on multiple constitutional grounds, Exxon lawyers asked a federal judge in Texas to dismiss the investigations.

Although the Texas judge declined to rule, he embraced Exxon and Smith's contention that the New York and Massachusetts investigations were intended to "squelch public discourse by a private company that may not toe the same line as these two attorneys general." The case has been transferred to New York federal court, where a judge has yet to rule.

Back Home in the 21st District

For the most part, Smith hasn't had to address the climate issue back home, even though polls show that a majority of his adult constituents believe human activity is causing global warming and Texas has suffered more severe climate and weather disasters since 1980 than any other state.

...

===

omfg

http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-obama-climate-policies-2333194787.html

President Trump will travel to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today at 2 p.m. to sign a broad executive order that will take aim at key Obama-era climate policies, setting the stage for several extended energy fights in the months and years to come.

Ordering a review and rewrite of the Clean Power Plan is the main target in the executive order's crosshairs, but the order will also highlight several other policies in jeopardy, including the social cost of carbon figure, regulations on coal plants and methane emissions and the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands.

"The Trump Administration continues to fulfill its campaign promise to trample on environmental protections and prioritize the jobs of fossil fuel executives under the guise of protecting American workers," said Ken Berlin, president and CEO of The Climate Reality Project.

While the move to scrap the Clean Power Plan raises questions on the efficacy of the U.S. involvement in the Paris agreement, a White House official said on a Tuesday night press call to review the order that staying in Paris is "still under discussion."

we hit 1.1C over avg only get 1.5%

Planet Enters 'Uncharted Territory' 3/17. see Global Warming.

*Global temperatures are on the rise again as 2016 has been marked as the hottest on record. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which published its annual assessment of the climate today, said the unusually warm weather has continued into 2017.

Global warming, experts say, is largely driven by human activity and the release of carbon dioxide emissions. But an El Niño weather pattern consisting of naturally warm weather in the equatorial Pacific region is also a contributor.

"Even without a strong El Niño in 2017, we are seeing other remarkable changes across the planet that are challenging the limits of our understanding of the climate system. We are now in truly uncharted territory," World Climate Research Programme Director David Carlson said in a release.

In the WMO's annual State of the Global Climate, it said that in the years since 2001, temperatures have been at least 0.4 degrees Celsius above the long-term average for the 1961-1990 base period. And those temperatures continue to be consistent with a warming trend of 0.1-0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, it added.*

lossdoom rcvr

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

On a knife edge’: Experts warn of new signs the Great Barrier Reef is at severe riskJessica Corbett / Common Dreams

Lack of Policy Urgency as Permafrost Thaws

Study confirms fear that intense ocean acidification portends ecological catastrophe: ‘We have been warned’Julia Conley / Common Dream

Climate Change Threatens Two-Thirds of North American Bird Species With Extinction

good

Australia Cuts Outlook for Great Barrier Reef to ‘Very Poor’ for First Time icn 919

‘A requiem for American democracy’: 5-4 Supreme Court vote rules partisan gerrymandering is ‘beyond the reach of the federal courts’

Thresholds 'Show How Much Is at Stake'

Trees Play a Critical Climate Role

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of ...

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and ... - Amazon.com

Lester R. Brown - Wikipedia

Scientists Warn We May Be on Track for 'Hothouse Earth'

SODA TAXES TACKLE PUBLIC HEALTH CHALLENGES

BIG SODA TURNS TO THE BALLOT TO BLOCK LOCAL HEALTH LAWS

PORTRAIT OF RESISTANCE

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

A NATIONAL MODEL

HOPING FOR AN ENCORE

Fossil Fuel Industry Outspent Environmentalists and Renewables by 10:1 on Climate Lobbying, New Study Finds

The Difference of a Half Degree

A Different Energy Future, if Not for Fracking?

The Difference of a Half Degree

A Different Energy Future, if Not for Fracking?

On a knife edge’: Experts warn of new signs the Great Barrier Reef is at severe risk Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams