Report: Polar Bears Unlikely to Survive Unless Global Emissions Reduced

Polar bear. (photo: Brian Battaile/U.S. Geological Survey/AP)

 

Al Jazeera America | Reader Supported News | July 3, 2015

US Fish and Wildlife Service says species may not survive unless emission of greenhouse gases is curbed

 

olar bears are at risk of dying off if humans don’t reverse the trend of global warming, a blunt U.S. government report filed Thursday said.

“The single most important step for polar bear conservation is decisive action to address Arctic warming,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a draft recovery plan, part of the process after the agency listed the species as threatened in 2008.

“Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice, it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered.”

Halting Arctic warming will require global action, the report said. Greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming, which is reducing the Arctic’s amount of summer sea ice.

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The Disparate Impact of Climate Change

The Pope’s new encyclical illuminates a concept we should all get to know better: disparate impact. (Image: Coal power via Shutterstock)

 

Sheila Suess Kennedy | Inequality.org | Truthout | June 28, 2015

Constitutional lawyers who work on issues of equal rights use the term “disparate impact,” a term describing laws that—despite being facially neutral—have a very different effect upon citizens who are differently situated. Sometimes that different impact is intended; often it is not.

What brought that bit of “legalese” to mind was this recent headline in the New York Times: “Pope Francis to Explore Climate’s Impact on the World’s Poor.”

The article began by discussing a recent meeting between high-level representatives of the U.N. and the Pope:

Mr. Ban, the United Nations secretary general, had brought the leaders of all his major agencies to see Pope Francis, a show of organizational muscle and respect for a meeting between two global institutions that had sometimes shared a bumpy past but now had a mutual interest.

The agenda was poverty, and Francis inveighed against the “economy of exclusion” as he addressed Mr. Ban’s delegation at the Apostolic Palace. But in an informal meeting with Mr. Ban and his advisers, Francis shifted the discussion to the environment and how environmental degradation weighed heaviest on the poor.

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Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together

Naomi Klein. (photo: Kourosh Keshiri/Grist)

 

Naomi Klein | Common Dreams | Reader Supported News | June 22, 2015

This speech was delivered on June 6, 2015, in Bar Harbor, Maine, as the College of the Atlantic commencement address.

 

irst of all, a huge congratulations to all the graduates—and to the parents who raised you, and the teachers who guided you. It’s a true privilege to be included in this special day.

Mine is not going to be your average commencement address, for the simple reason that College of the Atlantic is not your average college. I mean, what kind of college lets students vote on their commencement speaker—as if this is their day or something? What’s next? Women choosing whom they are going to marry?

Usually, commencement addresses try to equip graduates with a moral compass for their post-university life. You hear stories that end with clear lessons like: “Money can’t buy happiness.” “Be kind.” “Don’t be afraid to fail.”

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Oligarchy and Climate Change: A Catastrophic Coincidence

Naomi Klein | The Guardian UK | Reader Supported News

09 March 2015

The second in a major series of articles on the climate crisis and how humanity can solve it. In this extract taken from the Introduction to This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, the author calls the climate crisis a civilisational wake-up call to alter our economy, our lifestyles, now – before they get changed for us.

You can read the first extract here.

 

The alarm bells of the climate crisis have been ringing in our ears for years and are getting louder all the time – yet humanity has failed to change course. What is wrong with us?

Many answers to that question have been offered, ranging from the extreme difficulty of getting all the governments in the world to agree on anything, to an absence of real technological solutions, to something deep in our human nature that keeps us from acting in the face of seemingly remote threats, to – more recently – the claim that we have blown it anyway and there is no point in even trying to do much more than enjoy the scenery on the way down.

Some of these explanations are valid, but all are ultimately inadequate. Take the claim that it’s just too hard for so many countries to agree on a course of action. It is hard. But many times in the past, the United Nations has helped governments to come together to tackle tough cross-border challenges, from ozone depletion to nuclear proliferation. The deals produced weren’t perfect, but they represented real progress. Moreover, during the same years that our governments failed to enact a tough and binding legal architecture requiring emission reductions, supposedly because cooperation was too complex, they managed to create the World Trade Organisation – an intricate global system that regulates the flow of goods and services around the planet, under which the rules are clear and violations are harshly penalised.

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Climate Change Demands Marshall Plan Levels of Response

Polar bear in the Arctic. (photo: Ralph Lee Hopkins/Corbis)

Naomi Klein | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | March 7, 2015

voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled to depart Washington DC, for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the plane. They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn’t pry it loose. The airline had hoped that without the added weight of the flight’s 35 passengers, the aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn’t. Someone posted a picture: “Why is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank four inches into the pavement.”

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures”.

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting tarmac. This irony – the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels – did not stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from re-embarking and continuing their journeys. Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news coverage of the incident.

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Antarctic gaining sea ice despite climate model predictions – study

RT News | March 6, 2015

For decades, climate scientists have been predicting that quantities of ice in the South Pole would shrink in the face of climate change and other global warming-related issues, but a recent study by scientists in China has found that the ice levels have actually been growing in the region over decades. RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky has more on the controversy from New York.

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Let’s call it: 30 years of above average temperatures means the climate has changed

Earth under water – earth texture by NASA.gov (Shutterstock)

The Conversation | Raw Story | February 28, 2015

If you’re younger than 30, you’ve never experienced a month in which the average surface temperature of the Earth was below average.Each month, the US National Climatic Data Center calculates Earth’s average surface temperature using temperature measurements that cover the Earth’s surface. Then, another average is calculated for each month of the year for the twentieth century, 1901-2000. For each month, this gives one number representative of the entire century. Subtract this overall 1900s monthly average – which for February is 53.9F (12.1C) – from each individual month’s temperature and you’ve got the anomaly: that is, the difference from the average.

The last month that was at or below that 1900s average was February 1985. Ronald Reagan had just started his second presidential term and Foreigner had the number one single with “I want to know what love is.”

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The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk

As sea levels rise, floods have become more common on the Norfolk, Va. base. (photo: Michael Pendergrass/US Navy)

Jeff Goodell | Rolling Stone | Reader Supported News | February 16, 2015

The leaders of our armed forces know what’s coming next – but deniers in Congress are ignoring the warnings

 

aval station Norfolk is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic fleet, an awesome collection of military power that is in a terrible way the crowning glory of American civilization. Seventy-five thousand sailors and civilians work here, their job the daily business of keeping an armada spit-shined and ready for deployment at any moment. When I visited in December, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was in port, a 1,000-foot-long floating war machine that was central to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cranes loaded equipment onto the deck; sailors rushed up and down the gangplanks. Navy helicopters hovered overhead. Security was tight everywhere. While I was checking out one of the base’s massive new double-decker concrete piers that’s nearly as big as a shopping-mall parking lot, I wandered over to have a closer look at the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer that has spent a lot of hours on watch in the Mediterranean. Armed men on the deck watched me warily — even my official escort seemed jittery (“I think we should step back a bit,” he said, grabbing my arm).

You can’t spend 10 minutes in this part of Virginia without feeling the deep sense of history. The Battle of Hampton Roads, a famous naval showdown between two Civil War ironclads, occurred just offshore. The base was a key departure point for thousands of sailors during World War II, many of whom never returned. Their ghosts still haunt the place. Everyone’s aunt or uncle has a story to tell about a night in a port in Brisbane or Barcelona or about the way their ears rang the first time they heard a cannon firing from the deck of a ship.

But within the lifetime of a child growing up here, all this could vanish into the Atlantic Ocean. The land that the base is built upon is literally sinking, meaning sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average. There is no high ground, nowhere to retreat. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over — and that’s pretty much what it is. All it takes is a rainstorm and a big tide and the Atlantic invades the base — roads are submerged, entry gates impassable. A nor’easter had moved through the area the day before my visit. On Craney Island, the base’s main refueling depot, military vehicles were up to their axles in seawater. Water pooled in a long, flat grassy area near Admiral’s Row, where naval commanders live in magnificent houses built for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. “It’s the biggest Navy base in the world, and it’s going to have to be relocated,” says former Vice President Al Gore. “It’s just a question of when.”

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White House: Climate Change Threatens National Security

A flooded neighborhood in Tuckerton, New Jersey, after Hurricane Sandy. (photo: U.S. Coast Guard/AFP/Getty Images)

Timothy Cama | The Hill | Reader Supported News | February 7, 2015

he Obama administration looks at climate change as a threat to national security on par with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and disease outbreaks.

President Obama’s national security strategy released Friday updates the previous plan published in 2010, with focuses on Russia, Islamic militants and health.

“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water,” the White House says in the 35-page strategy document.

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Global Warming Is a National Security Threat

Is global warming a national security threat? (photo: Jianan Yu/Reuters)

young man pushes the wheelchair of his grandfather off the plane into the cheering crowd at the La Crosse Regional Airport. The two of them are returning from Washington, D.C., after visiting the World War II Memorial as part of the Freedom Honor Flight.

This veteran is part of the “Greatest Generation.” His generation responded with unselfishness and courage when our national security was threatened by attacks from Japan and Germany. Because of his generation, the United States was secure when World War II ended 70 years ago.

Seventy years from now will be 2085. The current generation will be as old as the veterans of WWII are now. What will the grandchildren of this generation think of their grandparents?

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