Thursday, 17 October 2019

A reason for hope from Sir David Attenborough




Sir David Attenborough ci fa il suo ultimo grande dono. Ci ricorda con parole sincere che non vi รจ un altro momento per agire. Possiamo ancora salvare noi stessi e il nostro pianeta.

How Earth Would Look If All The Ice Melted: YouTube





We learned last year that many of the effects of climate change are irreversible. Sea levels have been rising at a greater rate year after year, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates they could rise by another meter or more by the end of this century. As National Geographic showed us in 2013, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world's major cities. Science Insider tells you all you need to know about science: space, medicine, biotech, physiology, and more. 

Wednesday, 16 October 2019

ACT Greens call for static pill testing site as NSW Coroner recommendations released

Responding to a draft recommendation of the NSW coroner that pill testing be provided at music festivals, the ACT Greens have today called for a static pill testing trial to be established in the ACT.

"I am not surprised to hear of the coroner's draft recommendation relating to pill-testing. The Greens know that pill-testing is a successful harm minimisation activity, and a key step to save lives in festival environments," Greens spokesperson for Drug Law Reform Shane Rattenbury said today.

"The NSW coroner is an independent judicial body that has today, after exploring the evidence in relation to  the deaths of six young people at music festivals between December 2017 and January 2019, come to the same conclusion of other medical bodies - that pill-testing reduces harm from drug use.

Tuesday, 15 October 2019

Ghost Forests Are Visceral Examples of the Advance of Climate Change: NYT




"As Matt Kirwan walks through Maryland’s Blackwater National Refuge, his rubber boots begin to squish. With each step the land beneath him turns from dry ground to increasingly soggy mud. The trees around him go from tall and full of leaves or needles to short, bare and pale white.

Partway out, ankle deep in water, Kirwan stops. “At this point we’ve transitioned from being in the forest, to actually being in a full-fledged marsh,” explains the Virginia Institute of Marine Science ecologist. “This ground is now too salty and too wet to support living trees.”

Kirwan is standing in the midst of what is known as a “ghost forest.” These swaths of dead, white, trees are created when salty water moves into forested areas, first slowing, and eventually halting, the growth of new trees. That means that when old trees die, there aren’t replacements." ......

Read the NYT article 

Related: 

There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one: ABC

 

#jailclimatecriminals  #westandwithGreta  #suefossilcorpdirectors

Monday, 14 October 2019

Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different: NYT

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.
There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable
energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. 
Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

Read the NYT article 

See also: 

Blame for Extinction Spreads to Methane Gas: NYT

 

#jailclimatecriminals  #suefossilcorpsdirectors

Blame for Extinction Spreads to Methane Gas: NYT

"Two hundred million years ago, at the end of the Triassic period, a mass extinction, often attributed to major volcanic activity, wiped out half of all marine life on Earth. But new research published in the journal Science suggests that the extinction was more likely to have been caused by the release of at least 12,000 gigatons of methane from the seafloor into the atmosphere."

"Dr. Ruhl and his colleagues studied carbon isotopes of sediments from the period and found that the extinction event coincided with the giant release of methane into the atmosphere.
Volcanoes still played in a role in the process, Dr. Ruhl said.

“There was a release of CO2 from volcanic eruptions that warmed up global temperatures and also the ocean,” he said. “Methane is only stable under certain temperatures. If it gets warm, it is released.”

The study could be foreshadowing the effect of climate change on Earth, Dr. Ruhl said. An increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil-fuel use could warm up the planet enough to release methane from the ocean floors, he said."

Read the NYT article

Friday, 11 October 2019

How to Have a Useful Conversation About Climate Change in 11 Steps Climate change can be an emotional topic. Here’s how to approach it: Medium

.... "After working in mental health and education for 20 years, I’ve learned that nobody likes being told what to do. When we want to talk about climate change with friends or family, or even with a stranger on social media, I think we too quickly launch into a proclamation of the superiority of our opinions. We lecture more than we listen and this gets in the way. A key question is this: How can we have productive conversations about climate change that result in people feeling more engaged, informed, and willing to do something different?
Here is an 11-step guide that will get results:

f1. Know thyself

Before you have a conversation with someone else, you need to have a conversation with yourself. (Thank you, Richard of City Atlas.) Begin by asking yourself this question: “Why does climate change matter to me?” Spend time getting familiar with your own thoughts, emotions, assumptions, stories, and consumption habits. Ask yourself the questions in this 11-step map and really listen to everything you have to say. This will give you an invaluable foundation of self-understanding and self-awareness, and it will make you well-prepared to have your first conversation with someone else about climate change."