These are todays Climate News Stories:
- "Our leaders are lost and our planet is damaged."—
- Insulate Britain: Climate protester, 82, prepared to go to jail
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In the Democrats’ Budget Package, a Billion Tons of Carbon Cuts at Stake
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World leaders at UN urged to end public finance to fossil fuels
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Twin threats: Climate migrants said to face greater risk of modern slavery
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Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?
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The Fires That Raged on This Greek Island Are Out. Now Northern Evia Faces a Long Road to Recovery
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How climate change is making inequality worse, especially for children
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Haaland embraces 'indigenous knowledge' in confronting historic climate change impacts
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Race to the bottom: the disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea
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Beyond the hockey stick: Climate lessons from the Common Era
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Warming Trends: Katherine Hayhoe Talks About Hope, Potty Training Cows, and Can Woolly Mammoths Really Fight Climate Change?
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Pa. community’s fight against electric lines shows tensions coming with push toward a clean energy future
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On the Klamath, Dam Removal May Come Too Late to Save the Salmon
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Heathrow Found to be World’s Second Most Polluting Airport in New Report
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'We have a shrinking window': Dr. Michael Mann urges immediate action on climate change
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Is Humanity Doomed? Science Says We Are In Middle Of A 'Mass Extinction Event'
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We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?
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In Baltimore Schools, Cutting Food Waste as a Lesson in Climate Awareness and Environmental Literacy
This Is An Open Thread
"Our leaders are lost and our planet is damaged."
Noted young climate activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate on Tuesday excoriated global leaders' response to the planetary crisis, with Thunberg calling it "a betrayal of all present and future generations."
"Our leaders are lost," said Nakate of Uganda, "and our planet is damaged."
"Our hopes and dreams drowned in their empty words and promises."
—Greta Thunberg
Their blunt remarks came in keynote addresses at the opening of the three-day Youth4Climate summit in Milan. Hundreds of young people are gathered there for in-person working groups to hash out proposals to present to ministers at the Pre-COP in Milan later this month and COP 26 United Nations climate talks starting next month in Glasgow.
Simply focusing on adaptation measures, as Nakate put it, amounts to climate injustice. "You cannot adapt to lost traditions. You cannot adapt to starvation. You cannot adapt to extinction," she said.
Insulate Britain: Climate protester, 82, prepared to go to jail
An 82-year-old climate change protester says she is prepared to go to prison for blocking motorways.
Judy Bruce, from Swansea, is a member of the Insulate Britain group, which has blocked parts of the M25 five times in the last fortnight.
She said she had already spent three nights in custody but "nothing has got the impact that disruption does".
On Thursday the UK government won a court ruling against Insulate Britain, which wants the installation of heat-saving measures in social housing by 2025, and all homes by 2030.
In the Democrats’ Budget Package, a Billion Tons of Carbon Cuts at Stake
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was explaining why he opposed his Democratic colleagues’ $3.5 trillion budget plan, but his words summed up the Congressional response on climate change for the past 30 years.
“What is the urgency?” asked Manchin in an appearance on CNN on Sunday.
With climate action advocates now in a race against both the forces of nature and the political calendar, some might say the answer is obvious.
The legislation that Manchin wants to stall contains the policies that most Democratic senators see as the best hope left to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gases necessary to curb devastating planetary warming.
World leaders at UN urged to end public finance to fossil fuels
As world leaders prepare to discuss the energy transition at the UN, hundreds of green groups are calling for an end to international public finance for fossil fuels.
In a statement, over 200 organisations from over 40 countries said renewables are cost competitive with fossil fuels and can meet the global south’s electricity and clean cooking needs.
It comes as heads of state and ministers meet leaders from business, finance and civil society in New York. The goals of the “high level dialogue” are to agree a roadmap to achieving “clean, affordable energy for all” by 2030 and share action plans.
Twin threats: Climate migrants said to face greater risk of modern slavery
Salamatu, 22, from northern Ghana, has worked as a porter in Accra for seven years after repeated flooding on her family's farm forced her to seek a living in the capital. But she doesn't get to keep much of what she earns.
Her boss takes most of the money to cover her accommodation and even pay for the pan she balances on her head to carry goods - and she owed more after accidentally dropping someone else's things in the market.
"I have been working endlessly and have not been able to repay," Salamatu told researchers in a new report on the links between climate-related migration and modern slavery by Anti-Slavery International and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?
We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia, which together emit around a fifth of anthropogenic CO2?
Our modern urban environments are largely constructed from concrete — which is made from cement — and steel. Most of our food is grown through the application of fertilizer made from ammonia. These most ubiquitous industrial materials are produced at huge expense of energy and carbon dioxide emissions.
Their staid industries have prospered for over a century using largely unchanged manufacturing processes. But the urgent need to produce green ammonia, steel, and cement is starting to shake them up. Research is providing new options for fundamental changes to chemical processes. And in recent weeks, leading players have announced major initiatives in each of these three crunch industries.
The Fires That Raged on This Greek Island Are Out. Now Northern Evia Faces a Long Road to Recovery
From the backyard of their house in the northern part of Greece’s Evia Island, Vasiliki and Ioannis Tertipis used to look out on pine forest that stretched from the mountains down to the Aegean Sea. Now all they see is charred remains, the acres of pine and olive trees they own in ruin.
The fires in northern Evia started in August and raged for 10 days, burning hundreds of thousands of acres. And although the flames have now been extinguished, in many ways the Tertipis’ problems have just begun. If they plant new olive trees, it will take at least five years before the trees become productive. And pine trees need to grow for at least 20 years before the resin can be collected.
The couple worry about their financial stability in the coming years, and they blame the Greek government for the destruction spread out before them.
“They have destroyed us,” Vasiliki Tertipis said.
How climate change is making inequality worse, especially for children
Children born in high-income countries will experience twice as many extreme climate events as their grandparents, new research suggests.
But for children in low-income countries, it will be worse. They will see three times as many, say researchers at the University of Brussels.
The BBC’s population reporter Stephanie Hegarty has been looking at how climate change is already making poverty worse.
The link takes you too a 4:37 minute video ^^^
Haaland embraces 'indigenous knowledge' in confronting historic climate change impacts
A relentless drought and wildfire season in America's West and a tense standoff over federal leases for oil and gas drilling have been early tests for the Biden administration's climate policy and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the job and first indigenous member of a White House Cabinet.
"I can't speak for every tribe or even my tribe, but I can make sure that tribal leaders have a seat at the table," Haaland said in an interview with ABC News Live Prime. "Certainly, in this time of climate change bearing down upon us, that indigenous knowledge about our natural world will be extremely valuable and important to all of us."
"Indian tribes have been on this continent for millennia, for tens of thousands of years," she added. "They know how to take care of the land … that's knowledge that's been passed down for generations and generations."
Race to the bottom: the disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea
A short bureaucratic note from a brutally degraded microstate in the South Pacific to a little-known institution in the Caribbean is about to change the world. Few people are aware of its potential consequences, but the impacts are certain to be far-reaching. The only question is whether that change will be to the detriment of the global environment or the benefit of international governance.
In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority (ISA) based in Kingston, Jamaica of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen). Innocuous as it sounds, this note was a starting gun for a resource race on the planet’s last vast frontier: the abyssal plains that stretch between continental shelves deep below the oceans.
In the three months since it was fired, the sound of that shot has reverberated through government offices, conservation movements and scientific academies, and is now starting to reach a wider public, who are asking how the fate of the greatest of global commons can be decided by a sponsorship deal between a tiny island and a multinational mining corporation.
Beyond the hockey stick: Climate lessons from the Common Era
Abstract
More than two decades ago, my coauthors, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, and I published the now iconic “hockey stick” curve. It was a simple graph, derived from large-scale networks of diverse climate proxy (“multiproxy”) data such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, and lake sediments, that captured the unprecedented nature of the warming taking place today. It became a focal point in the debate over human-caused climate change and what to do about it. Yet, the apparent simplicity of the hockey stick curve betrays the dynamicism and complexity of the climate history of past centuries and how it can inform our understanding of human-caused climate change and its impacts. In this article, I discuss the lessons we can learn from studying paleoclimate records and climate model simulations of the “Common Era,” the period of the past two millennia during which the “signal” of human-caused warming has risen dramatically from the background of natural variability.
Michael’s post is long & has many sub topics.
Warming Trends: Katherine Hayhoe Talks About Hope, Potty Training Cows, and Can Woolly Mammoths Really Fight Climate Change?
Critics are questioning claims by a start-up biotechnology company that a genetically engineered version of the woolly mammoth could help alleviate climate change and restore Siberia’s grassland ecosystem to its Pleistocene heyday.
Colossal, a company founded by technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, announced Sept. 13 that it had received $15 million in funding to develop a hybrid mammoth-elephant, using CRISPR technology to introduce mammoth genes into an Asian elephant genome. The first calf, Lamm said, could be born within four to six years. The hybrid creature would have notable features of the extinct proboscidean, like small ears, a domed head, long fur, cold-tolerant blood and optimal fat distribution.
Some scientists have been highly skeptical about the project’s chances of success. But critics are especially dubious about Colossal’s claim that a herd of woolly mammoth-elephants could help save the planet from the climate crisis. And it has not escaped attention that, at a time when global warming is receiving unprecedented attention, many companies are suddenly discovering a climate link for their products.
Pa. community’s fight against electric lines shows tensions coming with push toward a clean energy future
This article is about building new transmission lines. I couldn’t excerpt it to make sense. The article starts off with a family that has owned the property those lines need to cross that had been there for 150 years & they fought & won.
On the Klamath, Dam Removal May Come Too Late to Save the Salmon
The removal of four obsolescent hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, expected in 2023 or 2024, should have been an occasion for celebration, recognizing an underdog campaign that managed to set in motion the biggest dam removal project in American history.
But that was before the basin’s troubles turned biblical.
The main reason for removing the dams is that they have played a major role in decimating the basin’s salmon population, to the point that some runs have gone extinct and all others are in severe decline — and the basin’s four Indigenous tribal groups, whose cultures and diets all revolve around fish, have suffered as the fish have dwindled. But this year the basin has experienced so many kinds of climate-change-linked plagues — a paradigm-shattering drought, the worst grasshopper infestation in a generation, and a monster fire — that it’s uncertain whether the remaining salmon will survive long enough to benefit from the dams’ dismantling.
Heathrow Found to be World’s Second Most Polluting Airport in New Report
London Heathrow is the second highest-emitting airport in the world, with its passengers contributing as much to climate change as four coal-fired power plants, new research shows.
The UK capital’s six airports make it the most polluting city by aviation emissions, responsible for 23.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2019, the report found.
Heathrow accounts for more than two thirds of the city’s aviation emissions and is second only to Dubai International globally, despite efforts to paint the west London airport as environmentally-friendly.
The authors of the report, by Transport & Environment, ODI and the International Council on Clean Transportation, said they hoped its findings would support challenges to airport expansion and force a “focus on the infrastructure that enables air travel and leads to more CO2 emissions in future decades”.
What It Feels Like to Have a Pipeline Cut Through Your Town
“I have nothing against the pipeline; they’ve always been good to the community,” bartender Mary Hesse said, voice rising. “My take is these protesters aren’t from here. They can go back to where they came from, and that includes Jane Fonda!”
I’d come to the D&K Corner Bar in Plummer, Minnesota (pop. 289), to understand how neighbors of the new Line 3 oil pipeline felt watching Canadian energy company Enbridge carve a deep trench all the way across their state this summer. It wasn’t the first time a pipeline had crossed Plummer—the original Line 3 went in 50 years ago. But this new “replacement” project is bigger. It will transport tar sands crude, which is particularly hard to clean up when it spills. And construction this summer coincided with the worst drought in Minnesota since the Dustbowl and a cloak of wildfire smoke from Canada, conditions exacerbated by humans burning fossil fuels in the first place.
Mary had been counting out pull tabs—little cards that look like lottery tickets but operate like mini paper slot machines—for her customers when I arrived. Arlys and Roger Konickson, who were coming up on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their friend John Zimpel, who had committed 35 years of his life to the Plummer Fire Department, would occasionally slap down a matching card. They told me they didn’t mind losing a little money because the proceeds went to the local Lions Club, which donated heating oil to the town’s churches.
'We have a shrinking window': Dr. Michael Mann urges immediate action on climate change
Climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the climate provisions in the reconciliation bill and why it is essential that we move quickly to pass legislation. "We have a shrinking window of opportunity to prevent truly catastrophic climate change if we act boldly now. If we fail to act, we will leave behind a fundamentally degraded planet for our children and grandchildren. I don't think they want that to be their legacy."
this is a video Michael did with MSNBC
Is Humanity Doomed? Science Says We Are In Middle Of A 'Mass Extinction Event'
Is the threat of a mass extinction event on Earth looming large? Scientists have found a key signifier of impending doom for all civilisation on Earth.
Based on algae and bacterial bloom patterns in water bodies, scientists are convinced that a serious extinction event is about to hit us. Changes in the algal and bacterial make-up of water bodies points to an ongoing ecological disaster.
These changes are akin to what happened when the last mass extinction event happened 251 million years ago, known as the "Great Dying". At this time, 90 per cent of all species on Earth disappeared, marking the biggest loss of life on the planet.
We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?
As western wildfires become bigger and more intense, state and federal fire agencies are using more and more aerial fire retardant, prompting concerns over fish kills, aquatic life, and water quality.
As the Caldor Fire roared toward drought-stricken Lake Tahoe in the last days of August, firefighters faced a sobering scenario: Strong winds increased from the southwest, pushing the fire toward populated areas and prompting tens of thousands to flee.
For days aerial crews dropped fire retardant from planes, aiming to slow the fire's progress and lessen the intense heat so that ground crews could approach. But the fire just kept coming — until winds shifted and smoke-clogged Tahoe was spared.
In Baltimore Schools, Cutting Food Waste as a Lesson in Climate Awareness and Environmental Literacy
As a “farm to school specialist” in the Baltimore City public schools, Anne Rosenthal splits her time between an office and Great Kids Farm in Catonsville, a 33-acre plot of land, complete with forests, a stream, greenhouses and a barn with animals, owned and operated by the school district.
“A lot of students have never had the opportunity to plant a seed or a small plant, or harvest straight from plants and taste farm-fresh produce,” Rosenthal said.
When kids have that first experience of “picking a cherry tomato off the plant and putting it in their mouths,” she said, “they’re much more apt to be excited to see that cherry tomato on their school lunch tray.”
Beyond the obvious educational benefit from this type of hands-on learning, Rosenthal works to help implement the Baltimore Food Waste and Recovery Strategy, which outlines a plan for K-12 schools to divert 90 percent of their food waste and recyclable waste from the city’s incinerator and landfill by 2040. This ambition mirrors waste diversion benchmarks recently set by the city as a whole.
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis worldwide while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality politics, and the arts.
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