Climate Change

“Yes, we do need hope—of course, we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.” By Jon Queally Common Dreams (12/19/18) As youth climate campaigners in the U.S. city of Brooklyn on Wednesday plan to continue a climate strike at least partly inspired by the ongoing vigil begun by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg in Sweden earlier this year, a new TEDx Talk released this week reveals that what inspired the Swedish teenager to take action was as simple as it was profound: she fell into sadness as she saw the leaders of…

Insect apocalypse is the cutting edge of global collapse of life. The Thom Hartman Show (11/29/1 Is the extinction of the human race the final domino to fall in a chain of extinctions and species die offs that may have always started? What can we do to save the planet before the domino ends all life on earth? Link to 11+-Minute Video

“Sometimes it seems as if I’ve banged out a trillion words over the last half-century in news dispatches, books and assorted screeds. None, I believe, are more important than these.” By Mort Rosenblum Readers News Service (12/6/18) PARIS – Let’s be clear before it is too late. Any government leader or corporate executive who flouts irrefutable evidence of climatic shifts is complicit in murdering the human race. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called willful denial of climate change “depravity” in a New York Times essay on heedless greed and hubris. That’s not the half of it. Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker,…

  By Oscar Reyes Inequality.org (11/9/18) A stark new United Nations climate report warns that humans have about 12 years to slash global emissions by nearly half. Unfortunately, that’s going to be extremely challenging without deep changes to the global financial system. Despite regularly claiming new commitments to “green finance,” the big banks continue to lend billions to the fossil fuel industry every year—including for the most extreme climate-damaging activities, like exploiting tar sands oils and burning coal. Continuing to invest in fossil fuels goes against all of the evidence about what needs to be done to tackle climate change. An…

  By Oliver Milman The Guardian (9/24/18) After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas. Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from…

  By Greta Mora Grist Magazine (9/20/18) Olga McKissic lives in an airy, white-brick home with a pillared porch, the kind where you might sit and watch fireflies late in the night. The only issue is that every few years, the rising waters from a nearby river pour into her Kentucky home, ascending the porch like an uninvited guest. Her home flooded in 1997, 2006, 2013, and 2015. “That property that we purchased back in 1986, that we thought was such a wonderful, tranquil, lovely place — it’s a nightmare to live here with the thought that it is going…

  Major rollbacks of DNR wetlands protections quietly set the stage for massive flooding destruction without precedent this August and September in Sauk, Dane, and other counties. Many rollbacks came in unorganized knee-jerk pieces over Walker Administration’s eight years.  Policies determined by the people changed to policies wanted by corporations or rich campaign contributors. In April 2016, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker with sponsorship by Wisconsin’s Senators Leah Vukmir and Frank Lasee and Representative Adam Jarchow enacted SB459 into Law.  SB459 caused wide-ranging deregulation of wetlands and navigable waters that removed protections controlling wild forces-of-nature and allowed man-made foolishness. This major repeal…

“The GOP’s reassurance that if only you don’t mention it in the newspapers, climate change won’t happen, may be goofy and endearing to some, but for most of the people in the world it ruins their chances of taking the climate crisis seriously and doing something practical about it.” — Juan Cole, “Dear Carolinas: You Can’t Outlaw Storm Surges and Climate Crisis; Physics Isn’t Interested in Your Laws.” Read the Rest and 3-Minute Video (Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

  By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (8/17/18) Amid a flurry of “breathless headlines” about warnings in a new study that outlines a possible “Hothouse Earth” scenario, one co-author optimistically expressed his belief that “people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit.” In an interview with the Guardian on Friday, Stockholm Resilience Center executive director Johan Rockström declared, “This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now.” Rockström’s study has received an “unprecedented” amount of global attention in the past week—270,000 downloads and counting. “Yes, the…

  By Jon Queally Common Dreams (8/23/18) Climate justice advocates and green groups are calling foul on the fossil fuel industry and their GOP backers in Congress over an effort to secure tens of millions of public taxpayer dollars to fund a giant offshore “spine” of seawalls and other barriers to protect Gulf Coast refineries from the threat of sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms that scientists have explained are the direct result of the very global warming and climate impacts these interests continue to deny even exist. Like other oceanfront mitigation projects, the Associated Press reported late Wednesday night, “…this one would protect…

  ABC News (Australia) (8/6/18) In 1973, Australia’s largest computer predicted trends such as pollution levels, population growth, availability of natural resources and quality of life on earth. ABC’s This Day Tonight aired this story on 9 November, 1973. Link to 10-Minute Video (Commoner Call art by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

  On Contact (7/27/18) Photographer and filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield, discusses the cult of self and its destructive qualities shown in her new film – Generation Wealth – with journalist Chris Hedges. Link to 27-Minute Video ‘Generation Wealth’ Trailer: Link to 2-Minute Video

  Democracy Now! (8/14/18) California jurors have awarded $289 million in a historic verdict against Monsanto in the case of a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after using its weed killer, Roundup. We speak with Brent Wisner, the lead trial counsel for Dewayne Lee Johnson, who has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Doctors say he is unlikely to live past 2020. Johnson’s was the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging glyphosate causes cancer. Filed in 2016, it was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his illness. Link to Story, Transcript and 17-Minute Video With Merger Pending, Bayer Shares Plunge After…

  [Editor’s Note: One of the guests in this Democracy Now! interview provides an excellent description of how the impact of climate change in the Arctic is changing the jet stream, which is having direct impacts on our weather and the wildfire situation this summer. — Mark L. Taylor] Democracy Now! (8/9/18) The Mendocino Complex Fire in Northern California is now the largest wildfire ever recorded in California’s history. It started burning in July—the state’s hottest month on record. Of the 20 largest wildfires in California history, 15 have occurred since 2000. This year’s fires have already burned nearly three…

  By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (7/31/18) As deadly wildfires continue to rage in California—destroying hundreds of homes, threatening thousands more, and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate—experts believe the blazes are part of “the new reality” that climate scientists have warned about for decades. “This past month shows climate change for real and in real time,” The Fresno Bee declared in an editorial published Monday. The ferocious California fires, the Guardian reports, have “spawned bizarre pyrotechnics, from firenados to towering pyrocumulus clouds that evoke a nuclear detonation. These events are not aberrations, say experts. They are California’s future.” “More acres are burning,” Michael Wehner, a…

“Munch, munch…”   By Jonathan Watts The Guardian (7/22/18) Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days. As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded. To maintain our current appetite for resources, we would need the equivalent of 1.7 Earths, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research…

“The common good is not represented. By Itai Vardi DeSmogBlog (7/18/18) Industry sectors based on fossil fuels significantly outspent environmental groups and renewable energy companies on climate change lobbying, new research has found. In a study published today 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 that electric utilities spent the largest sums during this timeframe followed by the oil, gas, and coal industries, and transportation sector, respectively. Overall, lobbying…

    Agence France-Presse (6/11/18) Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees — a few dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks — have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, researchers said Monday. The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and some as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. “We report that nine of the 13 oldest… individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years,” they wrote in the scientific journal Nature…

  By Paul Voosen Scence (5/9/18) You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet’s flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly killed the CMS, Sciencehas learned. The move jeopardizes plans to verify the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris climate…

  By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (4/11/18) New research published Wednesday in the journal Nature raises alarm about how global warming is impacting the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream System, and how weakening ocean currents could influence extreme weather in Western Europe and sea level rise along North America’s East Coast. Although the two studies draw different conclusions about timing and causation, researchers agree that the system of ocean currents called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has notably weakened in recent decades. This key takeaway, as Damian Carrington at the Guardian notes, throws into question “previous predictions that a catastrophic collapse of the Gulf Stream…

  By Corky Siemaszko NBC News (4/6/18) If Henry David Thoreau were alive today, he might re-title his most famous work “On Golden Pond.” And he would be pissed. That’s because Walden Pond, the once-pristine jewel that inspired the American naturalist and philosopher in the mid 1800s, has been befouled by generations of swimmers urinating in the water, according to a new study. So much so that it is wrecking the ecosystem and devastating the fish population of the pond some 25 miles west of Boston that Thoreau immortalized in his best-known work, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods.” “These findings suggest that, although…

    By Damian Carrington The Guardian (9/26/17) The sixth mass extinction of global wildlife already under way is seriously threatening the world’s food supplies, according to experts. “Huge proportions of the plant and animal species that form the foundation of our food supply are just as endangered [as wildlife] and are getting almost no attention,” said Ann Tutwiler, director general of Bioversity International, a research group that published a new report on Tuesday. “Plant and animal species that are the foundation of our food supplies are as endangered as wildlife but get almost no attention, a new report reveals.” “If there…