Satellite Data Record Shows Climate Change's Impact on Fires : NASA

"By Ellen Gray,
NASA's Earth Science News Team

Hot and dry. These are the watchwords for large fires. While every fire needs a spark to ignite and fuel to burn, the hot and dry conditions in the atmosphere determine the likelihood of a fire starting, its intensity and the speed at which it spreads. Over the past several decades, as the world has increasingly warmed, so has its potential to burn.

Since 1880, the world has warmed by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.09 degrees Celsius), with the five warmest years on record occurring in the last five years. Since the 1980s, the wildfire season has lengthened across a quarter of the world's vegetated surface, and in some places like California, fire has become nearly a year-round risk. The year 2018 was California's worst wildfire season on record, on the heels of a devasting 2017 fire season. In 2019, wildfires have already burned 2.5 million acres in Alaska in an extreme fire season driven by high temperatures, which have also led to massive fires in Siberia."

Near Ebor in NSW, Australia

Read the complete NASA article

It’s Time To Start Prosecuting Climate Criminals: Ecosystem Marketplace

 

#climatecriminals  #jailclimatecriminals  #jail the climate criminals  #climatecatastrophe

 

We are talking about 'drought-proofing' again – they are simplistic solutions that will destroy Australia : The Guardian

"The Australian landscape, its plants and animals have evolved to cope with episodic flooding. 

By removing the water and preventing floods, we are also destroying that landscape and rivers functions that give life to it. The key lies in striking a better balance between the needs of the natural environment, agriculture and our cities. It also lies in being a lot smarter in how we use our water. For example, almost all of our urban storm water and most of our sewage effluent is not recycled.

The second myth – of making the desert bloom by turning coastal rivers to run inland – is as much in vogue today as it was 100 years ago. The drought has prompted calls to revive the Bradfield scheme, a 1930-40s plan to turn the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers back across the Great Divide into central Queensland and connect to the Murray-Darling. Two centuries of development in Australia seem to have taught us little about the hazards of salinity, soil and water degradation, loss of habitat and species and the simple fact that the communities from which the water is taken will one day want it back. An awful political dilemma.

The third myth of “drought-proofing” our drier areas is equally fraught with risk because it invites us to grow things in areas where the nature of Australia makes it inadvisable to do so. It involves bringing water to places where it is normally only an episodic event, and can cause unforeseen problems. From a national perspective it is also unnecessary. Australia has a huge “fertile crescent” of reliable high rainfall country and fertile soils around our coastline, on which we could develop sustainable agriculture and horticulture."

"The critical need is not to drought­-proof the inland, for that is impossible.

It is to myth-proof Australians."

Read the complete The Guardian article by Honorary Professor John Williams 

#jailclimatecriminals  #climatechange  #jail climate criminals #suethefossilfools

Related:

"This fictional short story is set in 2068

Climate Risk in the Housing Market Has Echoes of Subprime Crisis, Study Finds: NYT

"Asaf Bernstein, an economist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said the findings highlighted another problem: By agreeing to buy mortgages for homes at risk from climate change, without charging a premium that reflects that risk, the federal government had effectively encouraged home construction and purchases in vulnerable areas.

“It’s basically an implicit subsidy,” Mr. Bernstein, who was not involved in the study, said.

Economists at both Fannie and Freddie have warned in the past of the risks that climate-related increases in flooding pose to the mortgage industry. In 2016, Sean Becketti, then the chief economist at Freddie Mac, wrote that rising seas “appear likely to destroy billions of dollars in property.”

“The economic losses and social disruption may happen gradually, but they are likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and Great Recession,” he wrote. “It is less likely that borrowers will continue to make mortgage payments if their homes are literally underwater.”

See also:

'It doesn't feel justifiable': The couples not having children because of climate change: SMH

 

How the Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media: NYT

Young people like Greta Thunberg are participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.

The kids aren’t just all right — they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.

Last Friday, millions of people, many of them children and teenagers, took to the streets during the Global Climate Strike, a protest inspired by Fridays for Future, the international youth effort started by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The protesters’ call for broad action to combat global warming was powerful, as was the message sent by their numbers: Dynamic, frustrated young people are instilling in the climate movement a new urgency. 

Online, the climate kids’ impact can be measured in a different way — by how they’re short-circuiting the right-wing media ecosystem that’s partly responsible for the spread of climate skepticism. Since Friday’s strike, pro-Trump media and conservative cable news pundits have devoted significant resources to turning the children of the climate movement into Public Enemy No. 1.

Read the NYT article 

Related:

Sanders Vows, If Elected, to Pursue Criminal Charges Against Fossil Fuel CEOs for Knowingly 'Destroying the Planet': Common Deams

 

#jailclimatecriminals  #globalwarming  #climate catastrophe  #suethefossilfools

Sanders Vows, If Elected, to Pursue Criminal Charges Against Fossil Fuel CEOs for Knowingly 'Destroying the Planet': Common Deams

 "They knew that it was real. Their own scientists told them that it was real. What do you do to people who lied in a very bold-faced way, lied to the American people, lied to the media?"

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

Published on

Friday, September 20, 2019

by

Common Dreams

During an MSNBC climate town hall at Georgetown University

on Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders said, if elected president in 2020, he would pursue criminal charges against fossil fuel executives for knowingly accelerating the ecological crisis while sowing doubt about the science to the American public.

"Duh, of course I would," Sanders said when asked by MSNBC's Chris Hayes if, as president, he would take legal action against fossil fuel companies.

"They knew that it was real," Sanders said, referring to fossil fuel CEOs' awareness of the climate crisis. "Their own scientists told them that it was real. What do you do to people who lied in a very bold-faced way, lied to the American people, lied to the media? How do you hold them accountable?"

"What do you do if executives knew that the product they were producing was destroying the planet, and they continue to do it?" the senator continued. "Do you think that that might be subject to criminal charges? Well, I think it's something we should look at."

Read the complete article 

See also:

Greta Thunberg condemns world leaders in emotional speech at UN : The Guardian

http://www.howglobalwarmingworks.org/ is worth a visit

This site's information helps people understand global warming's scientific mechanism.

How Global Warming Works: Climate Change's Mechanism Explained

by Professor Michael Ranney, Dr. Daniel Reinholz, and Dr. Lloyd Goldwasser (with help from Professor Ronald Cohen)

You may have heard of global climate change, which is often called “global warming.” Whether or not people accept that humans are causing global warming, most folks have an opinion about it. But how much do regular people understand the science of climate change? If you were asked to explain how global warming works, could you? Take a moment to try to explain to yourself how virtually all climate scientists think the Earth is warming. What is the physical or chemical mechanism?

Don’t feel bad; if you’re anything like the people we’ve surveyed in our studies, you probably struggled to come up with an explanation. In fact, in one study, we asked almost 300 adults in the US––and not a single person could accurately explain the mechanism of global warming at a pretty basic level. This is consistent with larger surveys that have shown that people often lack knowledge about climate change. But how can we make informed decisions without understanding the issues we’re debating?

Go to How Global Warming Works site to see videos etc

Five Types of Climate Change Deniers

Neil Van Leeuwen

 

20 February 2019 

"As I see it, there are at least five types of climate change denier. The word “denier” needs to be taken broadly here, because not all of these types are people who loudly proclaim that there is no anthropogenic climate change. But all five types do contribute to the wider phenomenon of denial. The types are these: The Deceiver, The Deceived, The Self-Deceived, The Skeptic, and the Truly Ignorant. These types overlap in interesting way, and it may be hard to tell in practice which type you’re talking to on any occasion. But listing them distinctly provides an intellectual tool for thinking about how to deal with deniers both theoretically and practically. So let’s spell them out.

Type 1: The Deceiver

This is type knowingly spreads misinformation about climate change. That could be denial that there is climate change, denial that humans are causing it, denial that the effects are as bad as scientists say, etc. But what is distinctive is that they are aware of what they are doing. They are willfully mendacious merchants of doubt—often with fancy degrees in the relevant sciences. They make good money from interests like oil and coal. The thing to know about the Deceivers is that they’re clever: they’ll know enough of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change that they can cherry-pick amongst it in order to present a distorted picture to those who are gullible. I think there are two ways to neutralize a Deceiver: (1) expose them for what they are by following the money (this is the one I recommend); (2) pay them more than what they’re getting from oil and coal (you have to have a lot of money for this one)."

Read the PhilosophyTalk article 

Related:

Trump's failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity: CNN