Time to hand over the baton.
By Jon Queally
Common Dreams (12/4/18)
Striking her mark at the COP24 climate talks taking place this week and next in Poland, fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden issued a stern rebuke on behalf of the world’s youth climate movement to the adult diplomats, executives, and elected leaders gathered by telling them she was not there asking for help or demanding they comply with demands but to let them know that new political realities and a renewable energy transformation are coming whether they like it or not.
Thunberg said that she was not asking anything of the gathered leaders—even as she sat next to UN Secretary General António Guterres—but only asking the people of the world “to realize that our political leaders have failed us, because we are facing an existential threat and there’s no time to continue down this road of madness.”
Thunberg explained that while the world consumes an estimated 100 million barrels of oil each day, “there are no politics to change that. There are no politics to keep that oil in the ground. So we can longer save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.”
“So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future,” she declared. “They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge.”
“On climate change,” said Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, the teenage Thunberg “demonstrates more clarity and leadership in one speech than a quarter of a century of the combined contributions of so called world leaders. Wilful ignorance and lies have overseen a 65 percent rise in CO2 since 1990. Time to hand over the baton.”
The climate crisis, she said, “is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. First we have to realize this and then as fast as possible do something to stop the emissions and try to save what we can save.”
(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)
Link to Story and 3-Minute Video
- Slash Meat Consumption & Avert Climate Catastrophe, Says New Blueprint for ‘Sustainable Food Future’ By 2050 — 22 proposals to feed the growing human population. To feed the growing human population—projected to reach about 10 billion by 2050—while curbing planet-warming emissions to ward off climate catastrophe, people across the globe must significantly cut back on eating meat from cows, sheep, and goats, according to a new study out Wednesday. Limits on meat-eating are among 22 proposals from the report that, if simultaneously enacted, could achieve “meeting growing demands for food, avoiding deforestation, and reforesting or restoring abandoned and unproductive land—and in ways that help stabilize the climate, promote economic development, and reduce poverty.” … Read the Rest
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A Major National Climate Report Came Out Then The Deniers Got On TV
By Joseph McCarthy
Weather.com
The Trump administration released a landmark climate report on Black Friday, but instead of becoming Thanksgiving leftovers, the 1,656-page report, a rigorous outline of the present and near-future hazards climate change poses to the U.S., was featured prominently on TV networks over the weekend and into the next week. Much of the coverage, however, included inaccurate, misleading or outright incorrect misinformation.
Assembled by 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies of President Donald Trump’s government, the National Climate Assessment points out the damage a changing climate has already wrought in the country and warns that unless serious action is taken immediately, the economy will be further damaged and additional American lives will be lost. Among the dire economic ramifications: “Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”
Following the release of the National Climate Assessment, climate change deniers got numerous chances to spread misinformation, unchallenged on TV.
But many of the talking heads featured on TV over the weekend contradicted not just the report’s findings, but even the well-established, widely agreed upon basics of climate science. The first sentence of the nearly 2,000 page report reads: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.” Even that was up for debate.
Oil industry shills
NBC’s Meet the Press, for instance, invited Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, to share her opinions on the report on Sunday. (AEI, which is known for sowing doubt about climate change, has received millions of dollars in donations from Exxon Mobil and the Koch Foundation.)
“I’m not a scientist,” Pletka said (truthfully), before saying: “We need to … recognize we just had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don’t talk about that because it’s not part of the agenda.”
This is not true.
“Of the 10 coldest years on record since 1880 in NOAA’s database, none of those occurred after 1913,” said Jonathan Erdman, senior meteorologist at weather.com. “While some regions have had a few cooler years recently,” he added, “when considering global temperatures as a whole, the data clearly shows warming has dominated and accelerated since the 1980s.”
More falsehoods and additional misinformation flooded news coverage of the report. …