The Year That Climate Change Became a Kitchen-Table Issue: Nexus Media

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

"Not only are more Americans worried about climate change than ever before, for the first time, a significant portion of the electorate rates climate change as a top issue. In 2016, climate change was the sixth most important issue for liberal Democrats, according to Yale and George Mason University, while today it’s their fourth most important issue. It may be higher still. A recent Marist poll found that, among all Democrats, climate change is the second most important issue, trailing only health care. And it’s not just Democrats. In particularly vulnerable parts of the country, like Florida, Republicans are worried too."

Read the Nexus Media article 

#voters  #politicians  #climatechange #politics #USA #republicans  #democrats

CCR: COP24: Capricious foes, Big Sister and high-carbon plutocrats

"If you ignore rising emissions from aviation and shipping along with those related to the UK’s imports and exports, a chirpy yarn can be told. But then why not omit cars, cement production and other so-called “hard to decarbonise” sectors? In reality, since 1990 carbon dioxide emissions associated with operating UK plc. have, in any meaningful sense, remained stubbornly static.[1] But let’s not just pick on the UK. The same can be said of many self-avowed climate-progressive nations, Denmark, France and Sweden amongst them. And then there’s evergreen Norway with emissions up 50% since 1990.
Sadly the subterfuge of these supposed progressives was conveniently hidden behind the new axis of climate-evil emerging in Katowice[2]: Trump’s USA; MBS’s Saudi; Putin’s Russia; and the Emir’s Kuwait – with Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, quietly sniggering from the side-lines. But surely no one really expected more from this quintet of regressives. It’s the self-proclaimed paragons of virtue where the real intransigence (or absence of imagination) truly resides. When it comes to commitments made in Paris, the list of climate villains extends far and wide – with few if any world leaders escaping the net."

Read the full Climate Code Red article 

#carbonemissions  #Sweden  #France  #aviation emissions  #cementproductionemissions

New U.S. Climate Assessment Forecasts Dire Effects On Economy, Health: NPR

"The Trump administration released a major climate assessment on Black Friday, the culmination of years of research by the country's top climate scientists. It's well over 1,000 pages and touches on a daunting range of topics.

President Trump said Monday that he has read parts of it. "It's fine," he told reporters at the White House, although he said he doesn't believe the report's assessment that climate change will cause devastating economic impacts for the U.S."

Read the NPR article 

#trump  #infrastructuredamage  #healthrisks  #climatecatastrophe

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'Retreat' Is Not An Option As A California Beach Town Plans For Rising Seas: NPR

"Del Mar is one of countless coastal communities in California and across the U.S. that is seeing the impacts of climate change and preparing for worse to come.


By midcentury, tens of millions of U.S. homes and billions of dollars of property are likely to be destroyed or made unusable by increased flooding from rising seas and storms, according to a recent climate report by the U.S. government.

"The feel-good here is gone. I thought they were going to bury me here, but if someone offered [to buy my house], I'd take it. I'd walk away."  John Imperato, Del Mar resident

"Sea level rise and storm surge could completely erode two-thirds of southern California beaches by 2100," the report warns.

That leaves residents of seaside towns like Del Mar with an alarming choice: stay and fight those impacts, or turn and leave."

Read the NPR article 

#sealevelrise  #climatecatastrophe  #climateaction

We have already created extreme extreme weather

Hurricane Michael, October 9, 2018. Source: NOAA

The Human Fingerprints on Extreme Weather

 

"Climate change is already taking a massive toll, and it’s only going to get worse."

"Hurricane Michael broke records Wednesday, when it became the most powerful cyclone ever recorded to make landfall along the Florida Panhandle. Abnormally warm waters fueled winds up to 155 miles per hour, which laid waste to homes and businesses caught in the storm’s path. As multiple outlets noted, climate change likely fueled the record-breaking wind speeds. That fact is notable given that both reporters and researchers have historically been reticent to link any one storm to climate change.

Five or ten years ago, if you asked a scientist how climate change figured into a particular hurricane, she would demur, saying that it was impossible to blame any single event on the overall warming trend. Those days are over. In the last decade, scientists have developed sophisticated tools for finding the human fingerprint on extreme weather. The emerging field of attribution research, as it’s known, investigates the role of climate change in specific events. A newly published report amassing more than 200 attribution studies makes clear that heat-trapping carbon pollution is already making the weather measurably more severe."

Read the Medium article

See also: Risks of 'domino effect' of tipping points greater...

#extremeweatherevents  #humancausedclimatechange  #hurricanemichael  #cyclones  #climatechange  #climateactionnow 

Talk is Cheap: Towards Active State Ownership in the Fossil Fuel Industry: Medium

Photo by Kevin Harris on Unsplash

"SOEs should seek to fulfill social and environmental objectives, beyond profit maximization and the economic rationale of minimizing the risk of stranded assets."

"The combustion of fossil fuels for energy is by far the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the energy sector will need change in order for long-term de-carbonization to succeed. So, it is disappointing that there has been little concrete climate action from the fossil fuel industry, despite commitments to the Paris Agreement."